Intelligent Advisor

After posting our draft Architectural Standards and Guidelines, we got a lot of good feedback and were pointed at documents to aid us that we were unaware existed. We are incorporating those internally.

In the same spirit, we just posted a temporal reasoning demo project. It can be found in the exchange. http://ruleexchange.squarespace.com/ It is under the folder "Sample Architecture Documentation" in the zip file "TemporalExampleOPA10.3.zip"

Temporal reasoning is one of the key benefits our agency wants from OPA. However, we find that potential rule modelers have a mental block on using temporal reasoning. We are not sure why. As architects, we love it. One of our first example projects a year ago tried to show how we might use temporal reasoning to solve the following challenges:

• How might we change rules over time?
• How might we change data over time? (a.k.a. change in circumstance)
• How might we go backwards in time to see the historical impact of rules?
• How might we go forwards in time to see if a rule still works in 5 years? (Yes, a rule that works today might break 5 years from now if it includes temporal reasoning. Ouch.)
• How might we correct rules that make it all the way to production but should not have?
• How can we take incorrect rate rules into account while moving forward and correcting rates? We want to easily rectify the negative impacts of an incorrect rate rule should one occur in the easiest way possible.

I uploaded the temporal reasoning example project from our library of projects. It provides possible answers to the questions in both Excel and Word.

Since there is more than one way to solve the problems above, feel free to call out why other methods may work better than the methods shown in the example.

Don't let all the commentary in the rules documents turn you off. There are only a few rules, but a lot of commentary on the rules. This project was in TFS. Hopefully, I successfully removed all the TFS version control junk prior to uploading.