Strategy Center Design and System Architecture Using LiteFlow

1 Background

The recycling business has grown rapidly, and under the three fulfillment modes of mail, door‑to‑door, and store, the business logic has become increasingly complex. Although the business is the same, many concepts are shared across fulfillment methods. To avoid duplicated effort and to align standards across the three fronts, a business middle‑platform was established, including a strategy center that aims to unify strategy management while supporting personalized configurations.

2 Strategy Center

The recycling business has long used price‑guarantee subsidy strategies, which improve order conversion rates and NPS. Consequently, various fulfillment lines have integrated price‑guarantee capabilities. Determining whether an order meets the subsidy policy requires a series of validations, typically implemented as independent functional nodes.

Simple flow of price‑guarantee subsidy validation

Our goal is to leverage the strategy center to offload subsidy logic, make it reusable across multiple business lines, hot‑pluggable, and reduce development costs. Starting from subsidy strategy consolidation, we aim to build a platform that provides standard capabilities that are both generic and adaptable to business‑specific needs.

Strategy Center Architecture

3 System Design

To facilitate management of strategy processes, we chose the LiteFlow framework.

3.1 LiteFlow

LiteFlow is a rule engine with orchestration characteristics; we can define each module as an independent component, allowing arbitrary workflow composition while keeping components decoupled.

Component : A component corresponds to a Node in our workflow. After version v2.12.0, there are three component types: ordinary, choice, and boolean.

Process : The workflow assembled by EL rules applied to component nodes.

LiteFlow Architecture

Other advantages of LiteFlow:

Comprehensive official documentation : The documentation is concise and well‑structured.

Hot‑plug : EL expressions can be changed at any time, enabling dynamic workflow adjustments and supporting smooth hot refresh.

Flexible data source configuration : Supports most common data sources such as Apollo and MySQL.

Active community : The author answers developers' questions daily in the community group.

3.2 Strategy Execution Process

With LiteFlow, we can create different subsidy strategies for various business scenarios. For example, when collaborating with external partners for recycling, we may want to skip the verification of a user's historical subsidy count to increase subsidy rates; we can configure a separate flow without that check for that specific line.

Strategy Execution Process

3.3 Canvas

To more conveniently manage our strategy processes, we want to operate and modify them via a backend, but LiteFlow does not support visual orchestration, so we independently developed a canvas feature to meet this need.

Backend Canvas

3.4 Node

Different strategy processes may require different node configurations. For instance, the default subsidy validity is seven days, but some processes need a longer period; therefore we implemented node editing capabilities to allow special configuration per node.

Editing Node Properties

When configuration changes are needed, locate the corresponding strategy chain and click the relevant node to modify its strategy settings.

Changing Process Node Configuration

4 Future Plans

Data Dictionary : We will design a data dictionary to simplify the definition of strategy input and output parameters.

Security : Because core strategies are critical, we will strengthen management through monitoring, version chains, and approval workflows.

Visual Configuration Backend : Currently the company supports two visual configuration backends (easyui and candy); we need to explore a suitable way to integrate existing architecture capabilities into them for zero‑code node configuration.

About the Author

Dos, R&D Engineer, ZuanZuan C2B Business

ZuanZuan R&D Center and industry peers' technical learning exchange platform regularly shares frontline practical experience and cutting‑edge technology topics. Follow the public accounts "ZuanZuan Technology" (comprehensive), "Big ZuanZuan FE" (frontend focus), and "ZuanZuan QA" (QA focus) for more practical content and open discussion.