A business rules management system leverages industry standard web services as a communication mechanism for invoking business rules.
You can use the workflow system to configure and invoke web services from within a workflow. As such, you can leverage web services as a communication mechanism for invoking business rules from within a workflow.
To integrate business rules into a workflow, you must first author a rule and deploy it to the business rules management system. As part of the deployment, you must tell the business rules management system to generate a Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) that describes the interface for invoking the business rule. You must then import the WSDL into the workflow system. The business rule is then available to use within a workflow. The final step is to configure calls to the rules engine to execute the business rules as part of a workflow.
The following illustration provides a graphical representation of how a rules management system interacts with a business process management system to integrate rules by using web services:
For more information on how to administer the web service, see Process Engine Web Service.
For more information on how to configure and invoke the rules using web service, see Web Services Usage