Design and Implementation of a Software System for High Level Business Rules

The Business Rules Group has highlighted the importance of the ownership of business rules by business people. This calls for a business oriented view of business rules. Accordingly, we propose to introduce a Business Layer on top of the CIM layer of business rules that considers the essential nature of business rules, their properties and structure as well as inter-relationships between business rules. We propose a model that inhabits the business layer. This model provides (a) flat and hierarchical business rules, (b) business rules that operate on the state of an enterprise and cause state changes (c) temporal constraints and specification of long running and instantaneous business rules. Further, we develop a Business Rule Management system(BRMS) that, besides basic CRUD capability, allows construction of business rules from given ones. Our proposals are exemplified with a subset of the business rules of a Library

Endogenous money supply and the business cycle

This paper documents changes in the cyclical behavior of nominal data series that appear after 1979:Q3 when the Federal Reserve implemented a policy to lower the inflation rate. Such changes were not apparent in real variables. A business cycle model with impulses to technology and a role for money is used to show how alternative money supply rules are expected to affect observed business cycle facts. In this model, changes in the money supply rules have almost no effect on the cyclical behavior of real variables, yet have a significant impact on the cyclical nature of nominal variables. Computational experiments with alternative policy rules suggest that the change in monetary policy in 1979 may account for the sort of instability observed in the U.S. data.Business cycles ; Money supply

The Institutional Framework for Doing Sports Business: Principles of EU Competition Policy in Sports Markets

The competition rules and policy framework of the European Union represents an important institutional restriction for doing sports business. Driven by the courts, the 2007 overhaul of the approach and methodology has increased the scope of competition policy towards sports associations and clubs. Nowadays, virtually all activities of sports associations that govern and organize a sports discipline with business elements are subject to antitrust rules. This includes genuine sporting rules that are essential for a league, championship or tournament to come into existence. Of course, „real? business or commercial activities like ticket selling, marketing of broadcasting rights, etc. also have to comply with competition rules. Regulatory activities of sports associations comply with European competition rules if they pursuit a legitimate objective, its restrictive effects are inherent to that objective and proportionate to it. This new approach offers important orientation for the strategy choice of sports associations, clubs and related enterprises. Since this assessment is done following a case-by-case approach, however, neither a blacklist of anticompetitive nor a whitelist of procompetitive sporting rules can be derived. Instead, conclusions can be drawn only from the existing case decisions – but, unfortunately, this leaves many aspects open. With respect to business activities, the focus of European competition policy is on centralized marketing arrangements bundling media rights. These constitute cartels and are viewed to be anticompetitive in nature. However, they may be exempted from the cartel prohibition on efficiency and consumer benefits considerations. Here, a detailed list of conditions exists that centralized marketing arrangements must comply with in order to be legal. Although this policy seems to be well-developed at first sight, a closer look at the decision practice reveals several open problems. Other areas of the buying and selling behavior of sports associations and related enterprises are considerably less well-developed and do not provide much orientation for business.sports business, competition policy, sporting rules, centralized marketing, sports economics

Potential for Development and Limitations of Regional Business Environment

The article considers some questions of institutional support for the development of the regional business environment. In connection with constantly growing social liabilities of regional and municipal authorities, which results in the upsurge of risks of budget imbalance at respective levels, the research provides a foundation to the necessity of forming favorable business environment promoting enterprise activity in regions. The process of creating institutes of a region’s business environment is analyzed with applying a matrix institutional model of entrepreneurship. The article reveals the mechanism stipulating the emergence of specific peculiarities of institutional configurations of the regional business environment. A conclusion is drawn about the decisive role of the institutional configuration of the business environment in the existing differences in the levels of social and economic development of regions. The researchers put forward a hypothesis that supporting a favorable institutional configuration of a region’s business environment that stimulates enterprise activity in the area cannot last indefinitely as its development is of a cyclical nature. Simulation parameters for the formation and maintenance of a favorable institutional configuration of the business environment are given. With the aim of practical application of the suggested approach, the authors suggest a methodology allowing for regional authorities to estimate the expediency of favorable institutional configuration of business environment, and on this basis to formulate rules of play for business so that these rules could boost business activity and increase the contribution of entrepreneurship to the region’s social and economic development. The approach under consideration provides an opportunity to substantiate a theoretical and methodological framework for developing practical mechanisms of projecting and further long-term maintenance of favorable institutional configuration of business environment which will contribute to expanding the region’s business activity, and which is resistant to negative effects of the external environment.Work produced with the financial support of the grant FSBI “Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation” in the framework of scientific — research project “Interaction of authority and business organizations in the municipalities: through compromise to mutual loyalty» № 15-12-02008

The reliability of Canadian output gap estimates

Recent work on policy rules under uncertainty have highlighted the impact of output gap measurement errors on economic outcomes and their importance in the formulation of appropriate policy rules. This paper investigates the reliability of current estimates of the output gap in Canada. We begin by assembling a new data base of quarterly realtime output estimates which spans the post-WWII period and contains data vintages dating back to 1972. We use this with a broad range of univariate and multivariate output gap models to recreate ?contemporary? estimates of the output gap and then study how these estimates are revised over time. The nature and sources of these revisions are used to draw conclusions about the overall measurement errors associated with current estimates of the output gap. Relative to similar recent work with US realtime data, we find that revisions in Canadian output gaps are more important and that the role of data revision is less innocuous than previously indicated. We also show that using the change rather than the level of the output gap may only modestly reduce the measurement problem, and we investigate the relative importance of model uncertainty to overall measurement uncertainty. --output gap,business cycle,real-time data,policy rules,monetary policy,Canada

A comparison between the South African "source rules" in relation to income tax and the "permanent establishment rules" as contained in double taxation agreements

South Africa's right to tax the income of a non-resident is determined in terms of the South African "source rules" established by court decisions in relation to the imposition of tax in terms of the Income Tax Act. Unless a non-resident's income is captured by the South African "source rules" (on the basis that hi slits income is derived from a South African source), South Africa would have no right to tax such income, even if such non-resident creates a permanent establishment in South Africa by performing business activities within South Africa which could be considered essential (but not dominant) in nature. In such scenario the activities performed by the non-resident in South Africa may utilise the natural resources and the infrastructure of South Africa, but the South African fiscus would be deprived of the right to any tax revenues attributable to the income produced partly by such activities within South Africa. The South African "source rules" refer only to the main or dominant activities giving rise to the income for the purpose of determining the source of such income (and accordingly the right to tax such income). On the other hand, the "permanent establishment rules" as set out under the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Model Tax Convention on Income and on Capital refer to all the taxpayer's essential business activities for the purpose of determining whether or not such activities create a pennanent establishment. The result of the narrow nature of the South African "source rules" is that, under certain circumstances, the South African fiscus would not necessarily be granted the right to tax all income produced partly within South Africa. The research demonstrated that incorporating the principles underlying the "pennanent establishment rules" into South African legislation would be a reasonable and logical solution to the problem of detennining the source of income. In so doing, the South African "source rules" would determine the source of income, and consequently South Africa's taxing rights, with reference to the essential business activities giving rise to such income. In such case South Africa would be afforded the right to tax the income of a non-resident in the event that it performs any of its essential business activities within South Africa, albeit not the dominant or main activities giving rise to the income

Influence of Administrative Regulation on the Efficiency of Business Activities in the Region

The article discusses the theoretical issues of the formation of the administrative regulation mechanisms for business entities. The necessity of the further development of theoretical and methodological base and the application tools for the design of business environment is proved. This can stimulate the growth of business and investment activity in the Russian regions and municipalities. The authors identify two types of government structures influence on the business entities, differentiated by the nature of the targeting impact on the economic activity of business structures—the administrative pressure and administrative assistance. It is suggested that in practice, high cost implications for compliance with all regulation requirements as well as sanctions for the violation of these requirements create preconditions for the development of informal interaction between entrepreneurs and the representatives of regulatory bodies. Therefore, businessmen try to minimize the costs associated with the implementation of formal administrative requirements, rules and regulations by personal arrangements. A mathematical model for the assessment of the informal interaction between business entities and certain officials of control supervisory authorities is proposed. It allows to determine the range of benefits for economic entities from avoiding the implementation of administrative norms, requirements and rules. It is concluded that unreasonably high level of costs for the implementation of formal administrative requirements rules and regulations by business entities composes the economic basis for the reproduction of informal relations. This determines mutual benefits for a number of entrepreneurs and a part of bureaucracy from various schemes of informal interaction.The article has been prepared with the support of the Grant of the Russian Foundation for Humanities in the framework of the research and development project " Development of a favourable institutional configuration of the regional business environment as the factor to increase the competitiveness of business entities" No. 16–12–02007

A FORMALIZED TRANSFORMATION PROCESS FOR GENERATING DESIGN MODELS FROM BUSINESS RULES

Business rules play a critical role in building and maintaining effective and flexible information systems. In light of that critical role, the publication of the Semantic Business Vocabulary and Business Rules standard (SBVR), has been regarded a highly significant advance. Following that release, a number of research efforts have been made to convert SBVR to design models, most of which are structural models represented in UML. However, so far the proposed methodologies tend to be of an exploratory nature in the sense that they are not built on a rigorous foundation. Our aim is to identify a core subset of the SBVR features and show how those core SBVR features can be translated into an equivalent UML structural model. To do that on a sound foundation, we first provide formal models of the core SBVR and the target UML class diagram. We then transform the core SBVR model to the UML class model, completed with proofs of correctness, and describe how the mapping rules can be applied in a transformation process. Finally, to show the usefulness of our formal approach, we discuss how it is used as a crucial component in a larger project, which embraces a number of practical objectives

Towards Auto Contract Generation and Ensemble-based Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Smart contracts (SC) are computer programs that are major components of Blockchain. The "intelligent contract" is made up of the rules accepted by the parties concerned. When the transactions started by the parties obey these established rules, then only their transactions will be completed without the involvement of a third party. Because of the simplicity and succinct nature of the solidity language, most smart contracts are written in this language. Smart contracts have two limitations, which are vulnerabilities in SC and that smart contracts can\u27t be understood by all stakeholders, especially non-technical people who are involved in the business, since they are written in a programming language. Hence, the proposed paper used the XGBoost model and BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) tool to solve the first and second limitations of the SC respectively. Attackers are drawn to attention because of the popularity and fragility of the Solidity language. Once smart contracts have been launched, they can’t be changed. If that smart contract is vulnerable, attackers may then cash it. BPMN is used to represent business rules or contracts in graphical notation, so everyone involved in the business can understand the business rules. This BPMN diagram can be converted into a smart contract template through the BPMN-SOL tool. A few publications and existing tools exist on smart contract vulnerability detection, but they require more time to forecast and interpretation of vulnerability causes is also difficult. Thus, the proposed model experimented with several deep learning approaches and improved F1 score results by an average of 2% using the XGBoost model based on the ensemble technique to detect vulnerabilities of SCs, which are: Denial of Service (DOS), Unchecked external call, Re-entrancy, and Origin of Transaction. This paper also combined two important features to construct a data set, which are code snippets and n-grams

Investigation into an improved modular rule-based testing framework for business rules

Rule testing in scheduling applications is a complex and potentially costly business problem. This thesis reports the outcome of research undertaken to develop a system to describe and test scheduling rules against a set of scheduling data. The overall intention of the research was to reduce commercial scheduling costs by minimizing human domain expert interaction within the scheduling process. This thesis reports the outcome of research initiated following a consultancy project to develop a system to test driver schedules against the legal driving rules in force in the UK and the EU. One of the greatest challenges faced was interpreting the driving rules and translating them into the chosen programming language. This part of the project took considerable effort to complete the programming, testing and debugging processes. A potential problem then arises if the Department of Transport or the European Union alter or change the driving rules. Considerable software development is likely to be required to support the new rule set. The approach considered takes into account the need for a modular software component that can be used in not just transport scheduling systems which look at legal driving rules but may also be integrated into other systems that have the need to test temporal rules. The integration of the rule testing component into existing systems is key to making the proposed solution reusable. The research outcome proposes an alternative approach to rule definition, similar to that of RuleML, but with the addition of rule metadata to provide the ability of describing rules of a temporal nature. The rules can be serialised and deserialised between XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and objects within an object oriented environment (in this case .NET with C#), to provide a means of transmission of the rules over a communication infrastructure. The rule objects can then be compiled into an executable software library, allowing the rules to be tested more rapidly than traditional interpreted rules. Additional support functionality is also defined to provide a means of effectively integrating the rule testing engine into existing applications. Following the construction of a rule testing engine that has been designed to meet the given requirements, a series of tests were undertaken to determine the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This lead to the implementation of improvements in the caching of constructed work plans to further improve performance. Tests were also carried out into the application of the proposed solution within alternative scheduling domains and to analyse the difference in computational performance and memory usage across system architectures, software frameworks and operating systems, with the support of Mono. Future work that is expected to follow on from this thesis will likely reside in investigations into the development of graphical design tools for the creation of the rules, improvements in the work plan construction algorithm, parallelisation of elements of the process to take better advantage of multi-core processors and off-loading of the rule testing process onto dedicated or generic computational processors