Rule Principles

To ensure the quality of rules created, Policy Modeling enforces several principles in rule authoring. The most important of these are:

1. Each conclusion must only be stated once. This is to avoid conflicting logic. For example if Rule 1 stated A is true if B is true, and Rule 2 stated A is false if C is true, then if both B and C were true it would be impossible to determine the outcome of A.
2. Each rule must have a comprehensive statement of conditions (including any reliance on other rules).
3. Each component of the rule must be clearly identifiable. The conclusion, conditions and any logical operators (and, or and so on) must be separated for clarity.
4. Each condition must itself be logically complete to determine the value of the condition. This also means that each Boolean attribute must be worded as a complete sentence.
5. Every rule must be knowable. It should not be possible for the policy model not to know the outcome if all data has been provided. The policy model should be a complete statement of the rules.
6. The order in which information is presented should not change the outcome of the rules. The policy model will always give the same outcome in the same situation regardless of the order in which the information is collected.