Buisness rules evaluation - is this a valid use case for Graph Engine? #360

Hello,

I'm a seasoned .NET developer, but new to Graph Engine, and I find its design interesting. I'm having a hard time, however, finding examples of valid use cases for it. I'm aware of the Publications and Talks page, but it seems like there are no video recordings (a talk usually contains much more spoken content that is actually on the slides). And it doesn't help that there's Microsoft Graph, which renders searching for Microsoft Graph Engine almost impossible.

I have a use case in mind and would appreciate help validating whether GE is a good match. The use case is a business rules engine. The rules can be represented as a directed graph where leaves contain immediate values and all other nodes contain computed values, like so:

graph TD;
X-->W
Y-->W
Z-->W
W["W = f(X, Y, Z)"]
A-->C
B-->C
C["C = g(A, B)"]
W-->Q
C-->Q
Q["Q = h(C, W)"]
class X,Y,Z,A,B leaf;
classDef leaf fill:blue,color:white,stroke:black;

Blue nodes represent immediate values, while f, g, and h represent arbitrary scalar functions, preferably implemented in C#. Let's assume that:

• the graph has ~50K nodes,
• the number of incoming edges may vary from 1-100,
• there are no cycles,
• ~90% of nodes perform arbitrary computations to determine their accidental value.

If this is making any sense so far in terms of GE, how would I go about the following:

1. Defining the graph and the computation functions.
2. Introducing changes to the graph and the functions.
3. Updating values of leafs.
4. Accessing values of any nodes or sub-graphs originating from a single node.

Most important of all - would it work fast?

I understand it's a large question, but I'm not in a rush and am willing to wait for a well-thought answer 😄 Thanks in advance to whoever decides to answer.