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.

You can do testing and simulation in either Decision Center console:

Business console: For business and technical users, the Business console offers testing and simulation for decision services. These features use scenarios in Excel files, and custom data providers. For simulations, users define KPIs, report formats, and simulation configurations in the console.
Enterprise console: Primarily for technical users, the Enterprise console offers testing and simulation for sets of rules. The proposed format for storing scenarios and their expected results is Excel, but you can use Rule Designer to customize a scenario provider and its rendering in the Enterprise console, and the KPIs used in simulations.

Restriction: 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. For more information about the workaround, see Operational Decision Manager Known Limitations.

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

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. When using Decision Validation Services, the Scenario Service Provider (SSP) supports testing and simulation in the Enterprise console.

Deprecated feature:

Deprecation icon Decision Validation Services is deprecated in V8.8.0. This feature will be removed in a future release of the product. See Deprecated features for migration details.

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 the Decision Center consoles.