Alex Karman
Revolutionary Machines, Inc.
Many organizations have spatial business rules. Customers and suppliers may have regions. Operations may vary by region. Distance may affect decisions. Until now, decision makers needed to use a geospatial information system (GIS) in order to explore spatial relationships, and then summarize those relationships in some way as scalar data in business rules. It created a barrier between subject matter experts and decision making software.

In this exciting presentation, we will explore a new system that allows business users to natively define and maintain complex spatial rules without becoming experts in specific Java APIs.  We applied OpenRules BDMS to create a new Spatial Decision Table template that allows stakeholders with no GIS training to use plain English in familiar Decision Model spreadsheets to define spatially aware business rules without any additional software. 

The Spatial Decision Tables works with two dimensional points or polygons. Leveraging the industry standard Java Topology Suite (JTS), and using plain English, OpenRules supports the nine classic Eganhofer spatial relationships (touches, inside, overlaps, disjoint. etc.); distance calculations; distance rankings; spatial buffering; and various aggregate functions.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate a practical use case from our major customer that shows how to:
  • Load Hospital Service Area, Hospital Referral Region, and Hospital Location data into OpenRules
  • Create Spatial Decision Table spreadsheets based on the Template
  • Combine them with non-spatial decision tables to demonstrate how Spatial Decision Tables can participate in complex Decision Modeling