Category Archives: Challenges

Challenge Apr-2024: Lookup Tables in Decision Models

Business decision models frequently use lookup tables that may contain thousands of data rows. There are at least two issues to be addressed when representing lookup tables: 1) users need to be able to modify the table data without modifications … Continue reading

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Challenge March-2024 “Analyzing Employees”

Decision models (similarly to databases) frequently deal with analysis of collections of objects. This month’s Challenge deals with such a situation: you need to help an HR office create a rules-based service to analyze its employees. Each employee  has a … Continue reading

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Challenge “Organ Transplants”: one more solution and ChatGPT

Our Mar-2019 Challenge “Organ Transplants” continues to genera an interest among DM practitioners. Jack Jansonius just submitted a new solution based on the integrated use of decision tables and SQL. We wonder if somebody tries to produce a working solution … Continue reading

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Challenge Aug-2023 “Soldier Payment Rules”

We decided to bring back Challenge “Soldier Payment Rules” which in 2017 received only two solutions. This is a good chance to demonstrate the expressive power of your DMN or other decision management tools. The proper decision model is supposed to assemble a … Continue reading

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Challenge July-2023 “Rules as Preferences”

In the real world not all rules can be satisfied and we may consider them as preferences. For example, our June-2023 Challenge “Miss Manners” used well-tuned data with equal numbers of males and females at each party. Of course, real data is not like … Continue reading

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Miss Manners is back – Challenge June-2023

This problem used to be one of the popular benchmarks for rule engines 20 years ago. It is interesting to see how modern decision engines can represent and solve this problem today. So, Miss Manners is throwing a party, and … Continue reading

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Challenge May-2023 “Next Best Action”

“Next best action” is a popular decision-making strategy. But how to define the “best” next action? This challenge may demonstrate it. Consider an NxN grid of lightbulbs. We are given an initial state where some of the bulbs are off and some are on. Then, … Continue reading

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Challenge Mar-2023 “Permit Eligibility”

Ponder our Mar-2023 Challenge: As part of a regulatory process, a government agency introduced a simple rule: an applicant is eligible for a resident permit if the applicant has lived at an address while married and in that time period, … Continue reading

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Christmas Model created by ChatGPT

With Christmas around the corner, we offer our readers this Challenge created by ChatGPT. It defines a set of people, a set of gifts, and the happiness level and cost of each gift. The objective is to maximize the total … Continue reading

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Challenge Nov-2022 “Crack Padlock Code”

Submit a solution using your favorite tool or just common sense.

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