Overview: Simulations in the Business console
You can determine how changes to rules or data affect the results of your business rule application before deployment.
You run a simulation on a decision service in an ungoverned branch, or a change or validation activity in a release. You use either fictitious data or real data from your organization, and display the results in a report defined by you. You then use the results of the simulation to refine the behavior of your business rules.
A simulation brings together data, rules, and key performance indicators (KPIs). You select the data and rules for the simulation, and you define the KPIs by using metrics that take values from the rules.
The KPIs represent the results of the simulation. You create a simulation report by adding KPIs in a report template, and then defining their appearance. You can even display KPIs in graphs to make their results easier to understand.
Versions of the simulation artifacts are saved, and a simulation runs the most recent versions of its artifacts. The Business console maintains a history of simulations, and you can rerun an old version of a simulation by restoring it.
You can change the elements in a simulation, and rerun the simulation to assess the results of the changes. You can also compare reports from different runs side by side in the console. Through this iterative approach, you can refine your rules to get the results that you want from your business rule application.
Change and validation activities
You can run simulations in the change and validation activities of a release in a decision service. In a change activity, you can use simulations to iteratively refine rules, and in a validation activity, you can use simulations to check the rules that were approved for the release.
Both types of activities use the same artifacts, that is, metrics, KPIs, scenarios, report templates, and simulation configurations. The activities within a release also share resources such as servers and decision services.
You can define artifacts in both types of activities. You can also import a simulation from a completed change activity into the validation activity of the same release. When you do so, all the artifacts in the simulation are imported, giving you a ready-to-run simulation in the validation activity. Importing a simulation saves you time in setting up a simulation in the validation activity, and you can apply a simulation that was used in developing the rules. To use a simulation from a change activity, the changes that were made in the activity must be merged into the release before the validation activity can see the simulation and import it.
The two types of activities handle reports differently. In a change activity, reports are listed in the Reports tab, and a new entry is added each time that you run a simulation. In the validation activity, there is no Reports tab. When you run a simulation in the validation activity, the report is listed with the simulation in the Simulations tab, and if you run the simulation again, the last report is replaced with the new report.
The validation activity lists the five most recent reports from different runs of a simulation in Recent reports for this version. You can compare simulation reports in a change activity or a validation activity, or you can compare a simulation report in a validation activity with a simulation report from a change activity.