Simulation testing

By running simulation tests in Pega Customer Decision Hub, you can derive useful intelligence that can help you make important business decisions. For example, you can examine the effect of a new product offer or assess risk in a variety of marketing or nonmarketing scenarios.

With simulation tests, you can run strategies of varying complexity on a preselected sample set of customers. By doing so, you can make millions of decisions at the same time and simulate the outcome of your decision management framework. After a simulation test has been completed, you can visualize the results in Pega Visual Business Director, where you can check whether the new strategy produces the expected result. For example, you can check whether customers are offered a new phone or Internet plan when certain conditions that are specified in the strategy are met. You can also assess the effect of the new product on your existing product offering.

In Pega Customer Decision Hub, you can run simulation tests with minimal amount of configuration. For example, you do not have to configure any simulation data flows or data set where the simulation result will be stored.

Additionally, you can perform various operations on already completed simulation tests, such as assigning additional reports to a simulation test or comparing simulation tests in Visual Business Director. You can also schedule a simulation test to run in the future. To evaluate your new strategies on the spot, you can simulate strategies directly from the Strategy canvas.

Simulation tests and the decision funnel

You can use simulation tests to understand the decision funnel, that is, the effect of the components that influence the outcome of a decision. Decision funnel explanation simulations break down the results of a decision funnel into granular analyses that help you understand how certain components of a decision influence the overall outcome. This type of simulation test includes predefined reports that drill down to the details of proposition counts by proposition filter, prioritization, switch and champion-challenger components.

To view the proposition count breakdown for a decision, select Decision funnel explanation when you create a simulation.

Simulation tests and revision management

If the environment where you want to simulate strategies is enabled for revision management, you can run simulation tests in the context of a specific revision. In revision management, simulation outputs are created as part of enterprise application rulesets, instead of revision branches or revision rulesets. Therefore, simulation outputs are not available for packaging.

Additionally, you can run simulation tests for strategies that are part of unsubmitted change requests. This option is available only when you do not simulate a strategy against a specific revision.