The people over at OpenRules have developed some very cool technology with their Rule Compressor. Given any decision table the compressor looks for redundant rule combinations and removes them.
If I have two rows in the decision table that look like this:
if age > 50 then decrease price by 10%
if age > 65 then decrease price by 10%
We have redundancy there and it can be combined into a single rule:
if age > 50 then decrease price by 10%
This is obviously a very simple case and the Rule Compressor can do much more complex combinations. I’ve taken the liberty of taking a screen shot from a section showing an example from their Rule Compressor explanation page:
