Introduction to Headless Decisioning with Intelligent Advisor

Intelligent Advisor Determinations API provides web service interfaces for deployed projects. The web services provide high performance, automated decisioning. This approach uses the rules within a project as a "headless" decision-making service – that is without any user interface.

Using Determinations API, developers automate decision-making in any application, while non-technical users maintain the rules in decision service projects in Intelligent Advisor Hub, or in Policy Modeling. This allows business logic to be changed without updating the application that is consuming the decisioning service, ensuring the application remains stable while the rules change as often as needed. Note that none of these APIs load or save data from a connected application. All data must be supplied in the information posted to the service. All decisions made using that supplied data are returned in the response.

Determinations API provides two RESTful services for decisioning:

Determinations API also exposes two SOAP web services for decisioning:

  • Assess service

  • Answer service

For more information, see SOAP Assessments with Policy Modeling Projects.

The following table provides a comparison of the features of the four different services.

Table 1. Comparison of batch assess service, decision service, assess service and answer service
Feature Batch assess service Decision service Assess service Answer service
Authoring experience
Policy Modeling checkmark   checkmark checkmark
Intelligent Advisor Hub   checkmark    
Connection
Policy Modeling project must be mapped to a web service connection       checkmark
Even if a connection is present, no data will be loaded from or saved to it checkmark checkmark checkmark checkmark
Input data query
Get details of the entities and attributes in the policy model needed to reach any decision checkmark   checkmark  
Get a description (using the connected web service's data model) of all mapped input data       checkmark
Get an OpenAPI description of the web service’s expected inputs and outputs   checkmark    
Input data
Provide some or all of the input data, with options for how to resolve missing data checkmark   checkmark  
Must provide all input data   checkmark   checkmark
Output data
Results are returned in a generic format, and can include missing relationships checkmark   checkmark  
Results returned are ready to submit to web service data connector       checkmark
Reports
Decision reports with customizable level of detail of how each value was determined checkmark   checkmark  
Audit report with full detail of how decision made       checkmark
General
Support for error and warning events checkmark   checkmark checkmark
Support for temporal data (change points) checkmark   checkmark checkmark