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International audience; Business Rules have the form if condition then action. A Business Rules program, which can be executed by means of an interpreter, is a sequence of Business Rules. Motivated by IBM use cases, we look at the problem of setting parameter values in a given Business Rules program so it will achieve a given average goal over all possible instances. We explore the following fundamental question: is there a general learning algorithm which addresses this issue? We prove the answer is negative. On the positive side, we derive operational semantics for Business Rules programs. As a proof of concept, we show empirically that these can be used to detect potential non-termination situations.

National audience; Production Rules or Business Rules are of the form 'if (condition) then (action)'. Sets of such rules can be executed on input data according to execution algorithms, or analyzed semantically using operational semantics, but the universality of systems or sets of such rules has never been characterized formally, to the best of our knowledge. Our goal is to show that for a simple execution algorithm, sets of Business Rule form a universal programming language. In other words, we show that Business Rules are Turing-complete. The proof consists in showing that a Business Rule program can be transformed in a WHILE program using additional variables. The implications of such a WHILE form include a type of structural operational semantics which may facilitate semantic analysis of Business Rule Sets.