#41: Empowering business automation with Quarkus

Business automation has been used in other industries for years. Now it’s available for software development. Our Red Hat guests Karina Varela and Donato Marrazzo tell us how business automation can help bridge the gap between business and technical teams.

What is business automation?

According to Red Hat, “Business automation is the alignment of business process management (BPM) and business rules management (BRM) with modern application development to meet changing market demands.”

Karina and Donato add their own definitions to the mix. Donato says, “Business automation is a bundle of two well-known technologies: one is the business process management (BPM) and the other one is digital management. When you contract these two, you are automating your business logic.” Karina adds, “When we are talking about automating business logic for decision processes, that’s business automation.”

The Kogito framework

Kogito, a cloud-native framework, is part of Red Hat’s business automation stack. “Kogito is this initiative that’s trying to modernize all our middleware, all of our processes, rules, and optimization, and make it even more lightweight, to make it run on top of a distributed environment instead of being in a monolith environment,” says Donato. Kogito appeals to developers for several reasons:

• Uses Quarkus to enable fast boot times and easier scaling
• Domain-specific flexibility
• Developer-centered experience with embeddable tooling

Mathematical optimization with OptaPlanner

Karina and Donato tell us about a relative newcomer to the Red Hat business automation portfolio, OptaPlanner, which focuses on mathematical optimization. Some real-world use cases for OptaPlanner include:

• Assigning shifts at a busy hospital
• Conference scheduling
• Vehicle routing with planned stops
• Any complex task with constraints

As Donato says, “Finding the optimal solution is nearly impossible, but finding the near-optimal solution, that’s what OptaPlanner is for. It’s constraint solving with artificial intelligence.” Karina explains more on how OptaPlanner works and how to use it, “You have to design the model and the constraints, and the OptaPlanner engine is going to solve the problem for you. ”

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