Creating simulation tests in Pega Customer Decision Hub

Create a simulation test to understand the effect of business changes on your decision management framework. For example, you can create a simulation test to investigate whether the introduction of a new business logic 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 in the simulation testing UI. You can also save the results to a data set for further processing.

  1. In the Pega Customer Decision Hub portal, 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:
    1. In the Application context section, expand the drop-down menu.
    2. Select an application context.
      For example: You can select the current application or a specific revision as the simulation context, if your application is enabled for revision management.
  4. 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 Decision funnel explanation to assess how certain components and expressions influence the outcome of a decision framework.
  5. Select a Strategy rule that you want to simulate:
    1. In the Strategy section, click Configure.
      You can simulate only one strategy at a time. When you select 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.
  6. Select the input data source for the simulation test:
    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.
  7. Optional: Edit the default simulation test ID by clicking the Edit icon in the Simulation ID prefix section.
  8. Optional: Define the storage point of simulation results by doing 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 enter the Name and Type parameters of the new output target.
    Note:
    • Simulations of the type Decision funnel explanation use a predefined ExplainDetails database table as the output destination. You must define an additional output destination for this simulation type if you want to assign additional reports in the Reports section.
    • 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: To remove old output data from the simulation test results, select the Clear previous results for simulation test check box.
  10. Add reports to the simulation output. This step is optional for simulations of the type Decision funnel explanation.
    1. In the Assign reports to outputs section, click Configure.
      In the Assign reports to outputs section, you can view all the 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.
    Note: Simulations of the type Decision funnel explanation use a predefined set of reports out of the box. To define additional reports for this simulation type, define an additional output destination as described in step 8.
  11. Save the simulation by doing 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.