RUNES II: A Distributed Rule Engine Based on Rete Network in Cloud Computing

In recent years, cloud computing has drawn more and more attention. Increasingly amount of systems and applications have been constructed in cloud environments, yet few researches of rule engine has been done. Rule engine technologies have been widely used in the development of enterprise information systems. These rule-based systems may encounter the problem of low performance, when a large amount of fact data are matched with these rules. Deploying rule engines in cloud environments can increase the capability and efficiency of these systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to implement rule engine based on a message-passing concurrency model in cloud computing. The approach can be extended conveniently and it can deal with extensive rules and facts efficiently. To improve the performance of the rule engine, an algorithm of allocation is proposed. A resource cost model is explored to make high efficient use of resources in cloud. In addition, we implement the rule engine system RUNES II in cloud platform and conduct experiments to show its performance.