The probability distributions supplied with Crystal Ball are useful in a variety of modeling situations. Organizations may still want to prepare their own libraries of distributions based on data specific to their applications and situations. One such system involves libraries of stochastic information packets (SIPs), an approach set forth in the article “Probability Management” (see the 2006 reference by S. Savage et al. in the Crystal Ball bibliography in the Oracle Crystal Ball Reference and Examples Guide.
A SIP is a list of time- or order-sensitive values for a particular variable. These values are sampled as sequential trials during a Monte Carlo simulation. SIPs are used to preserve the correlation structure between SIP variables without having to explicitly compute and define a matrix of correlation coefficients.
SIPs can be represented by custom distributions in Crystal Ball and can then be published and shared by organizations using Crystal Ball’s Publish and Subscribe features in the Distribution Gallery.
For details, see the Oracle Crystal Ball Reference and Examples Guide.