Creating simulation tests in Customer Decision Hub

Create a simulation test to understand the effect of business changes to your decisioning framework. For example, you can create a simulation test to investigate whether the introduction of a new proposition affects the frequency with which propositions would be offered across a segment of customers. When you complete a simulation test, you can view its output in Visual Business Director or save the results to a data set for further processing.

1. In Customer Decision Hub, click Simulation Testing.
2. In the top right corner of the Simulation Testing screen, click Create.
3. Select the application context for the new simulation test by performing the following actions:
   1. In the Application context section, expand the drop-down menu.
   2. Select an application context.
      you can select the current application or a specific revision as the simulation context, if your application is enabled for revision management.
4. Select a Strategy rule that you want to simulate by performing the following actions:
   1. In the Strategy section, click Configure.
      You can simulate one strategy at a time only. When you selected a strategy, you can view the application context of the selected strategy and its Strategy Result (SR) class.
   2. Click Add next to the strategy that you want to simulate.
5. Select the input data source for the simulation test by performing the following steps:
   1. In the Input section, click Configure.
   2. Click Add next to a data source to select it as input for the simulation test.
      You can select a Data Set, Data Flow, or Report Definition rules as input. For example, you can use the Monte Carlo data set to create a sample set of customer data for simulation purposes.
6. In the Purpose section, expand the drop-down menu and specify the simulation test type, for example, you can classify your simulation test as Validation if you want to debug a strategy configuration, or as Impact Analysis to assess how a new proposition influences your existing product offering.
7. Optional: Edit the default simulation test ID by clicking the Edit icon in the Simulation ID prefix section.
8. Define the storage point of simulation results by performing one of the following actions:
   • To configure an existing rule instance as the simulation output, click Add Existing and select an output from the list.
   • To create an output target for the simulation test, click Create New and provide the Name and Type parameters of the new output target.
   Note:

   • If you selected an output of Visual Business Director type for the simulation, a corresponding Visual Business Director report is automatically added in the Reports section.
   • You can add multiple outputs to a simulation test. The available output target types are Database Table and Visual Business Director.
9. Optional: Clear the output data set before the simulation test starts by selecting the Clear previous results for simulation test check box.
10. Optional: Add reports to the simulation output by performing the following actions:
    1. In the Assign reports to outputs section, click Configure.
       In the Assign reports to outputs section, you can view the list of all outputs that you configured for this simulation.
    2. Click Add.
    3. In the Output column, click Add to assign a report to an output type.
    4. In the Report category column, select the report category, for example, VBD or Distribution.
    5. In the Report column select the report to assign to the simulation output.
       For example, if you selected Simulations as the report category, you can select Channel Distribution as the report to simulate how a new proposition is being distributed across a specific channel.
    6. Click Done.
11. Perform one of the following actions:
    • To save the simulation test, in the top-right corner of the New Simulation Test screen, click Submit.
    • To save the simulation test and run it immediately, in the top-right corner of the New Simulation Test screen, click Submit and run.