:DROOLS:
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[[introduction]]

:context: introduction

[id='{context}']
= Introduction

link:https://www.drools.org/[{PRODUCT}] is a set of projects focusing on intelligent automation and decision management, most notably providing a forward-chaining and backward-chaining inference-based **rule engine**, DMN decisions engine and other projects. A rule engine is a fundamental building block to create an expert system which, in artificial intelligence, is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert.

{PRODUCT} is part of KIE (Knowledge Is Everything) open source community, which consists of various related projects, or groups of projects, that complete a portfolio of solutions for business automation and management. The most important other KIE projects or groups of projects are:

1. link:https://kogito.kie.org/[Kogito] is a cloud-native business automation for building intelligent applications, backed by battle-tested capabilities. It consists of multiple components, including {PRODUCT}, UI modelling tools, like VS Code editors extensions, etc.
2. link:https://www.optaplanner.org/[OptaPlanner] is a fast, easy-to-use, open source AI constraint solver for software developers. It is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine.
3. link:https://www.jbpm.org/[jBPM] is a toolkit for building business applications to help automate business processes and decisions.

== Additional resources
link:https://github.com/kiegroup/drools/[{PRODUCT} source code]

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