Ok, thanks. I can see how asserting a control fact would work here - I only asked about a terminate option to be able to avoid having to check for the absence of the control fact in every rule, but that's fine if that's what I have to do.
Thank s everyone for the help - it's been excellent and very instructive :o) p.s.: No, I don't use RuleFlow or jBPM. We're writing DRL's by hand and it's our expectation that we will have clinical content experts using Guvnor to author rules once we've got our new system up and running. At this point I'm just trying to establish what best practice for our domain ought to be. Peter. From: rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org [mailto:rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Michael Anstis Sent: Thursday, 10 March 2011 10:45 a.m. To: Rules Users List Subject: Re: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? I don't suppose you (Peter) use RuleFlow or jBPM? If not then remember rules' patterns are matched as facts are inserted into WM. The resulting activations are ordered by controlling semantics such as salience, no-loop, lock-on-active etc. Therefore should higher salience rules activations (that will be executed first) alter the state of WM lower salience rules' activations could be removed (by the presence of the control fact or non-null "advice" depending on what approach you take) and hence not be candidate for execution. This is why, IMO, people talk about considering all rules executing in parallel rather than sequentially. If you're using jBPM then fail-fast is an option, but not something I know much about. Cheers, Mike 2011/3/9 Greg Barton <greg_bar...@yahoo.com> "Control facts" is a term for objects in working memory that are not directly derived from outside data, or used as output. As their name implies, they're used to explicitly control flow of the rules. --- On Wed, 3/9/11, Peter Ashford <pet...@bestpractice.org.nz> wrote: From: Peter Ashford <pet...@bestpractice.org.nz> Subject: Re: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? To: "Rules Users List" <rules-users@lists.jboss.org> Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2011, 2:54 PM Working with Zombies? No... although some of our clients.... A wrinkle we have is that sometimes an exception case should terminate the decision. Usually that's an emergency case and it will be something like "this patient needs to be admitted to hospital immediately". In other cases, we want to provide some advice which a clinician may or may not choose to heed. It sounds to me that the insertLogical mechanism might well work for those latter cases (was this what you were referring to when you talked about 'control facts'?) In the other case - an emergency when you need to give one element of critical advice then quit - is there an option to terminate the rules immediately and return the current result? Peter From: rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org [mailto:rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Swindells, Thomas Sent: Wednesday, 9 March 2011 10:23 p.m. To: Rules Users List Subject: Re: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? I don't think you even need it that complicated. Just have your constraints in the form Patient(advice == null, ...) This assumes you only give the patient one advice at a time - if not control facts would have to be the way to go. You also need to make sure you actually tell the rule engine you have modified the patient when you set their advice - you need to wrap the call with a modify(p) {...}. Hope you get your zombies under control soon, Thomas From: rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org [mailto:rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Michael Anstis Sent: 09 March 2011 07:58 To: Rules Users List Subject: Re: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? You had me fooled Peter, I thought you worked in a zombie related field ;-) Control Facts can also be used, which I think David eluded to with his use of "null advice", such that:- rule "General brain eating advice" when p : Patient(eatsBrains == true) not Diagnosis( patient == $p ) then p.setAdvice("Stop eating brains, or at least, try to cut down"); insertLogical( new Diagnosis( $p ) ); end rule "Zombie exception to brain eating advice" salience -50 when p : Patient(eatsBrains == true, isZombie == true) not Diagnosis( patient == $p ) then p.setAdvice("Evidence suggests that the undead cannot contract Kuru or that the effects are irellevant given the " + "patient's current zombified state.\nSuggest euthenasing patient lest he/she eat your (or someone " + "else's) brains"); insertLogical( new Diagnosis( $p ) ); end As David states, more specific rules should have higher salience than the more general that should have lower. Salience controls conflict resolution, which is the order in which activations on the agenda are evaluated, it does not control which rules are evaluated - which happens as facts are inserted into working memory and not when fireAllRules( ) invoked. With kind regards, Mike 2011/3/9 Peter Ashford <pet...@bestpractice.org.nz <http://mc/compose?to=pet...@bestpractice.org.nz> > Thanks for the ideas, David. What I ultimately want to achieve is to have the individual rules independent of each other to the maximal degree to which that is possible. That's why I didn' t want to have isZombie==false in the general rule - I wanted the general case to be unaware of the exceptions. The field in which I'm working is clinical decision support where there might be a number of exceptions and corner cases. I'd like to be able to express the core logic without reference to the corner cases and then deal with the exceptions separately. I think your idea of using salience but only adding advice if it hasn't already been given fits the bill - that way the general case can be simple and not have to explicitly exclude all the exception cases. Thanks very much for the feedback - it's really valuable to get an idea about what options are available and what's considered best practice. Cheers! Peter. From: rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org> [mailto:rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org> ] On Behalf Of David Faulkner Sent: Wednesday, 9 March 2011 4:51 p.m. To: Rules Users List Subject: Re: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? Peter, The EXACT way to accomplish the functionality that you are looking for is "activation-group"; if two rules are in the same activation group, only one of them will fire. Note that the rule with HIGHER salience will fire first; to accomplish what you are looking for you'd have to give the exception rule a higher salience. I would also note that although there are specific instances where activation-group has a strong need, many in the community find that the most power and flexibility from the rule engine comes from "letting go" of trying to exactly order your rule execution, and instead letting the rule engine decide what would happen here. One way to accomplish this in your case would be to simply add (isZombie == false) to your constraint on the general rule. Another way that involves salience but NOT agenda groups is to set a high salience on your exception rule, but only add advice if advice is null. The possibilities are endless. With kind regards, David Faulkner david.faulk...@amentra.com <http://mc/compose?to=david.faulk...@amentra.com> From: rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org> [mailto:rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org> ] On Behalf Of Peter Ashford Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:24 AM To: Rules Users List Subject: Re: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? Actually, I think I've figured this one out : in the Zombie case, it's firing both rules and it's just that with the negative salience, the zombie exception rule is the last rule fired, therefore, the last thing written into advice. So... what would be the correct way to do what I'm trying to do here? The idea is that the Zombie exception rule should fire in preference to the general rule and that none of the general processing should occur at all (imaging that these rules had side-effects for the rest of the system they're attached to, we don't want all the general rule side effects to apply and then all the exception case side effects) Thanks in advance! Peter. From: rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org> [mailto:rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users-boun...@lists.jboss.org> ] On Behalf Of Peter Ashford Sent: Wednesday, 9 March 2011 1:31 p.m. To: rules-users@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users@lists.jboss.org> Subject: [rules-users] Misunderstanding salience? Hi There I'm new to drools. I've just set up the Drools-Server and it is (finally!) working and serving my test rule-set. The one thing that's not working as I expect it is the rule ordering via salience. This is my simple test rule set: rule "General brain eating advice" when p : Patient(eatsBrains == true) then p.setAdvice("Stop eating brains, or at least, try to cut down"); end rule "Zombie exception to brain eating advice" salience -50 when p : Patient(eatsBrains == true, isZombie == true) then p.setAdvice("Evidence suggests that the undead cannot contract Kuru or that the effects are irellevant given the " + "patient's current zombified state.\nSuggest euthenasing patient lest he/she eat your (or someone " + "else's) brains"); end The idea is that the first rule fires all the time unless the patient happens to be a zombie, in which case the exception rule (the second rule) kicks in. Now, as I have it here, with the exception at salience at -50 it actually works, which is the opposite of what I was expecting. I'd thought that I would have had to have the exception at a higher salience to fire first. That was what I tried first but that didn't work - everyone got the general advice, zombies included. What am I misunderstanding here? Thanks! Peter. --- "It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it" - Michael Bérubé on Republican climate change denial. _______________________________________________ rules-users mailing list rules-users@lists.jboss.org <http://mc/compose?to=rules-users@lists.jboss.org> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users ________________________________ ************************************************************************************** This message is confidential and intended only for the addressee. If you have received this message in error, please immediately notify the postmas...@nds.com and delete it from your system as well as any copies. The content of e-mails as well as traffic data may be monitored by NDS for employment and security purposes. 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