Overview of Decision Service References

Decision services can be referenced from Policy Modeling projects, allowing data and logic to be defined and maintained centrally in Intelligent Advisor Hub and shared across projects. (For more information on decision services, see Intelligent Advisor Decision Services.) Defining the data and logic in a decision service allows them to be updated whenever they are changed, independently of the Policy Modeling project.

These shared decision services allow any business user with authoring access to quickly and easily update the shared rules using a web browser, check that they all still work as expected, then publish them to the production environment where they will be immediately used by any Policy Modeling projects that reference them. The business user doesn't need a desktop application installation, and the Policy Modeling project doesn't need to be redeployed.

A decision service reference is defined in Policy Modeling and is used to link a decision service to a Policy Modeling project. Authoring a reference involves mapping Policy Modeling attributes to the decision service inputs and outputs.

A Policy Modeling project using references can be tested in the usual ways using the Debugger and test cases, and the decision services will be invoked as required. Note that:

• If an input field is required and the policy model value is uncertain, then the decision service is not invoked and the decision service outputs are all presumed to be uncertain.

• If an input field is optional and the policy model value is uncertain, then the decision service will be invoked.

• If any of the input values are unknown, then all the outputs will be unknown.

To get started, see Add a Decision Service Reference.

Note that an alternative to referencing a decision service from a Policy Modeling project, is to reference a decision service from another decision service in Intelligent Advisor Hub.