CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2021
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Delta Dental is the nation’s leading provider of dental insurance, serving more than 80 million Americans, with the core purpose of advancing the oral health of their customers, partners and consumers. Delta Dental of Michigan, headquartered in Okemos, Michigan, is at the forefront of utilizing rule-based solutions within their business operations and intelligence, with over 15 years of excellence in this domain.

When a Delta Dental developer wishes to engineer a rule-based solution, a non-trivial amount of setup must be completed first. Prototyping and testing of rule-based solutions are slowed down significantly by the setup process.

Our Rule Engine Command Line Interface provides an intuitive and interactive interface to Drools, the rule-based computing engine that Delta Dental’s developers use on a daily basis.

Using our software, developers interact with every part of the Drools engine. The interface is organized into various modules, each of which handles a core function of rule-based computing. Our modular design makes it easy to update or even swap out various components when Drools is updated, or new software is needed.

The Rule Engine Command Line Interface streamlines the development process for rule-based computing, saving Delta Dental a significant amount of time and resources.

For the convenience of Delta Dental developers, our software functions as a command-line shell program. Our software is written in core Java, and therefore runs on any computer that has a Java runtime environment. The external libraries, including the core Drools library, and build process are managed by Maven. Version control and collaboration management were provided by Gitlab.