Patent ID: 8396847

Claim:
A system to retrieve and analyze data, comprising: a computer hardware processing device configured to execute at least one data collection engine to retrieve selected data from at least one data source, wherein the selected data comprises a date, the selected data being related to an inquiry received from a requestor; a computer hardware processing device configured to execute at least one rules engine to apply predetermined functions to the selected data to respond to the inquiry and to return a result to the requestor, wherein the date is used to determine a variable related to the inquiry, wherein the at least one data collection engine and the at least one rules engine is executed by the same computer hardware processing device or separate computer hardware processing devices; and wherein the rules engine is configured to determine whether the variable is an atomic variable or includes sub-variables, wherein the variable is assigned to a customer as a variable value when the variable is atomic, and wherein the sub-variables are evaluated to determine the variable value to assign to the customer when the variable includes sub-variables; a ready to compute queue disposed between the at least one data collection engine and the at least one rules engine such that after the at least one data collection engine retrieves the selected data, but prior to the selected data being processed by a next available rules engine, the at least one data collection engine stores the selected data in the ready to compute queue to be processed by the next available rules engine; a validation module configured to identify and correct discrepancies in the selected data; and at least one post processor to process results from the at least one rules engine to formulate a customer list of the customers in a particular order based on the variable value, wherein the variable value is determined based at least in part on the date received from the selected data.