Tests and simulations for business rules

Decision Center includes testing and simulation features to verify rules and evaluate their results.

You can improve the performance of a business application by validating its rules before deployment. Decision Center offers you two ways to check rule behavior:
  • Testing: You run a set of rules on scenarios that are defined by you to compare the actual results with your expected results.
  • Simulation: You run rules on real or fictitious operational data, and use the results to assess and refine the behavior of the rules. You apply key performance indicators (KPIs) in analyzing the rules.

Business and technical users can do testing and simulation for decision services in the Business console. These features use scenarios in Excel files, and custom data providers. For simulations, users define KPIs, report formats, and simulation configurations in the console. They can also run tests with the Decision Center REST API.

Tip: The Excel scenario files for simulations and tests do not support XMLGregorianCalendar as a date type. When you try to create a XMLGregorianCalendar object, you get the error java.lang.InstantiationException. The workaround is to use the java.util.Date type instead and convert it to the XMLGregorianCalendar type.

The following diagram shows how rule testing and simulation work in Decision Center:

Diagram shows testing and simulation.

The diagram shows the runtime service application that is used in Rule Execution Server. The Decision Runner supports testing and simulation in the Business console.

You should be familiar with the section Testing and simulating rulesets, which describes what to do in Rule Designer to set up remote testing in Decision Center. See also Custom settings for information about setting up custom settings that can be used in defining tests and simulations.