G2 Standard

G2 is designed at its core for real-time reasoning and execution. All of its technologies work together in real time to drive decisions and actions. With G2, application builders have a comprehensive infrastructure of capabilities for working with the time-based requirements of their applications. This built-in infrastructure is an important productivity booster vs. traditional coding.

A few of G2’s real-time capabilities include:

• Processing tens of thousands of rules per second for high performance
• Data histories kept locally for high-performance time-based reasoning
• Time-stamping of data to support time-based reasoning
• Getting the best answer within a fixed time (reasoning within a deadline)
• Reasoning when data is missing (default reasoning)
• Built-in expressions for reasoning about time-based events and histories

G2 rules, which are in the form of “if…then” statements, reach conclusions and drive decisions, typically in real time. Rules reach conclusions from historical trends, predict problems, determine what actions to take to avoid or minimize loss, provide guidance to increase performance, and so forth. G2 represents rules in a natural language form, enabling domain experts to be directly part of rule creation and maintenance.

The rules and associated logic can be organized in several ways to facilitate their management, including via tables, tree diagrams, and hierarchical workspaces. Rule logic can also be represented in graphical structures to illustrate sequencing, relationships, and integration with process models.

For real-time coordination of business and workflow processes, G2 incorporates a high-performance graphical language, G2GL, directly into the platform that is based on the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) standard. With G2GL, users graphically model and execute parallel and sequential flow logic in real time for a wide variety of business and workflow processes.

G2’s ability to update any modeling or logic changes during runtime, without stopping to recompile and reload, is a major advantage for business agility, development productivity, and application maintenance.

For application development and maintenance, runtime editing adds tremendous value. While the application is being prototyped and built, developers and business users immediately see the impact of logic changes. During ongoing maintenance, logic edits are also immediate – there is no need to stop the application and reload the compiled code or the loaded operational data.

Nonstop execution is a fundamental capability of G2. Many applications have been operating continuously around the clock for years, except during power failures. In one deployment, for one of the world’s largest mutual fund companies, G2 has run non-stop for over eight years with zero downtime.

G2 delivers mission-critical reliability through several means. First, G2 is mature. It has been tested with many millions of hours of deployment in the most demanding installations. Through the experiences of these types of deployments, G2’s engineering team has continuously enhanced the platform’s design to ensure high levels of platform reliability.

G2’s object-oriented modeling offers highly reusable code and an application structure that is much more intuitive than those built with conventional programming tools. G2 objects graphically represent the properties and behaviors of items of interest and their relationships – such as physical items like a tank, pump, or instrument or abstract items like an event, task, decision, order, message, or logical connection. Essentially everything in a G2 application is a type of G2 object.

Other important G2 object modeling advantages include:

• Inheritance – Single and multiple hierarchical inheritances provide high levels of modeling productivity.
• Properties – Representable as real-time data, simulated data, text or logical variables, or even as another object.
• Methods – Represent object behaviors in real time as procedural code.
• Relationships – Intuitive creation of relationships via graphical connections and flexible definitions.
• Animation – Object icons have programmable animation layers to enhance human-to-machine interactions.
• Organization – Placement of objects and knowledge on graphical and programmable, hierarchical workspaces simplifies application organization and maintenance.

G2’s capabilities for runtime edits, intuitive graphical representation of object models, and intuitive natural language representation of rules and procedures provide a highly rapid prototyping and development environment. It is not unusual for first prototypes to be up and running within hours or days.

With rapid prototyping and development comes a major advantage of enabling close involvement with end users to help ensure that application functionality meets business requirements. End user experts can literally “look over the shoulder” of the application builder as object models and rule logic are created and in many cases take the lead for entering logic.

Unlike other rule engines, G2 unifies object modeling, simulation, rules, procedures, and deployment in one comprehensive and holistic real-time environment. This unification offers a tremendous benefit for efficiently managing an application’s lifecycle from prototyping to development to deployment to ongoing maintenance.

G2’s real-time processing begins within its internal scheduling engine for concurrently executing rules, procedures, models, and other tasks. Typically, many threads of reasoning, models, and other activities are occurring concurrently. The scheduler cycles according to a clock “tick” that can be specified at the millisecond level. Everything has a priority, so critical items can take action first. G2 takes care of the scheduling of tasks for the user based on simple configuration choices.