Product overview
Red Hat® Process Automation Manager is an application development platform that helps developers and business experts create cloud-native containerized microservices and applications that automate business decisions, processes, and operations. Process Automation Manager provides tools for modeling business processes and decisions, and supports both Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Decision Modeling Notation (DMN) standards. It includes advanced business rules and process engines, with support for complex event processing and case management, and a resource optimization engine that aids in solving complex planning and scheduling problems. Process Automation Manager lets you capture business policies and procedures, create applications that automate business operations, and measure the results of business activities. It includes easy-to-use graphical tools that foster collaboration between developers and business users in addition to providing better visibility into the rules and procedures that govern business applications.
Process Automation Manager is produced using Red Hat’s open source development model and by the members of the Drools and jBPM communities. It includes a rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide straightforward integration with a wide range of complementary solutions. In particular, Process Automation Manager interoperates with Red Hat’s portfolio of middleware products, including Red Hat Integration for integration with external applications and Red Hat Runtimes for access to supporting services such as single sign-on and in-memory databases.
Features of Red Hat Process Automation Manager
Process Automation Manager lets project stakeholders collaborate to build cloud-native business automation applications and microservices with a web-based authoring environment for developers and business experts. A rich set of tools for process and decision management covers the full process life cycle — from modeling, simulation, and testing to deployment, monitoring, and optimization. Process and decision logic can be modeled and automated together, without the need to learn multiple tools or develop custom integrations between disparate environments.
Process Automation Manager comprises powerful process and rules engines, helpful authoring tools, and a standards-based repository for business logic definitions.
Figure 1. Red Hat Process Automation Manager
Web-based business modeling tools
Process Automation Manager includes web-based tools for business users to manage the complete project life cycle, including:
- Business process modeling with drag-and-drop BPMN 2.0 diagramming and a powerful forms designer.
- Business decision modeling with drag-and-drop DMN 1.3 diagramming, decision tables, and a guided rules editor that supports business-friendly, domain-specific languages (DSL).
Figure 2. Drag-and-drop BPMN diagramming
Cloud-native development
Process Automation Manager runs in the cloud and generates cloud-native applications in conjunction with Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform. All components of the product are available as container images, ready for deployment on Red Hat OpenShift. Decision and process models can be built into containers and deployed via OpenShift Container Platform’s source-to image pipeline.
Applications also can be deployed to standalone or clustered servers within more traditional IT environments — accessed via representational state transfer (REST), Java™, and Java Message Service (JMS) APIs.
Runtime engines
Process Automation Manager includes Drools 7, a highly scalable forward- and backward-chaining inference engine capable of efficiently processing large rule and data sets.
New with Drools 7 is support for native execution of DMN decision models. This highly efficient approach to automating business decisions allows Drools 7 to directly execute DMN models without the need to convert to an intermediate rules format. Drools 7 includes full runtime support for DMN 1.3 models at conformance level 3, as defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) DMN specification, ensuring that any valid DMN 1.3 model can be properly automated. In addition, Process Automation Manager lets users combine machine-learned predictive models with DMN models to automate more complex business decisions. Machine-learned models can be imported via the industry-standard Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), and executed as part of a DMN decision.
For efficient execution of process models, Process Automation Manager includes the jBPM 7 business process management engine. Lightweight and flexible, jBPM 7 automates process and case models and can efficiently support thousands of process and case instances.
Resource optimization with OptaPlanner
Process Automation Manager includes OptaPlanner, a tool for constructing metaheuristic solvers for complex optimization problems. It can be used to build applications that optimize common business resource planning use cases, such as vehicle routing, employee rostering, cloud optimization, task assignment, job scheduling, bin packing, and many more. Most organizations face such scheduling puzzles and must assign a set of constrained resources — employees, assets, time, and money — to provide products or services. OptaPlanner helps users build real-time constraint optimization apps with minimal knowledge of metaheuristic techniques and algorithms to generate more efficient plans that can improve service quality and reduce costs.
Supported platforms
For a list of supported platforms on which Red Hat Process Automation Manager will run, visit https://red.ht/pam.
