The Link between Profile and SA is Effective Dated

An SA /Profile link is effective dated. Therefore, the data serving a given role may change over time. To be more explicit, a service agreement may have the data for Profile A serving as the Maximum Demand interval values at the beginning of the contract, then after a few months, perhaps Profile B's data may be used instead. This scenario assumes that the contract itself did not need to change.

Why would there be a need to change the profile being used for a given role (especially when the data itself changes every few minutes anyway)? There could be several reasons:

• Using the Maximum Demand example, perhaps the customer's usage profile has changed and this change warrants a different Maximum Demand curve (although, the rate does not change). A different common profile needs to be linked to the service agreement.
• Perhaps the interval size of the data for the customer has changed. If the rate linked to the customer can cater for the new interval size, a new profile with a different profile type needs to be linked to the service agreement.
• Recall that a profile's type contains the creation and validation algorithms. Perhaps algorithms needed to create or validate this profile have changed. To cater for this a new profile with a different profile type must be linked to the service agreement.

This design also applies to the link between an SA and a classic TOU map.