Understanding Program Rules

Program rules are used to define specific rules and parameters used by programs and program calculation rules. A program can have one or more associated program rules. If a program has more than one rule, the system uses the rule with the latest effective date/time.

Program rules are defined by the following:

• Rule Type: The type of rule.

• Effective Date: The date on which the rule is considered to be in effect. Only rules that are currently in effect can be used for score calculations.

• Expiration Date: The date on which the rule expires. Expired rules cannot be used for score calculations.

• Standard Score Parameters: Details about device score calculation cycles, including:

  • Cycle Frequency: The frequency of score calculation cycle periods. Can be either "Weekly" or "Monthly".

  • Week Start: The day of the week on which each week is considered to start, applicable to "Weekly" cycle frequency.

  • Participation Limit: The maximum number of times a device can successfully participate in an event in a cycle. The Score Calculation Factors section should have values defined for a number of cycles equal to this.

  • Participation Duration: The maximum cumulative duration of a device's successfully event participation in a cycle.

  • Duration Between Participation: The minimum duration between successful event participation for a device in a cycle.

• Score Calculation Factors: Details used in score calculations, including:

  • Cycle: The cycle in in which a device is currently participating. Calculated as the number of the device's successful event participations plus 1. There should be a number of cycles defined equal to the value of the Participation Limit in the Standard Score Parameters section.

  • Activation Cost: The activation cost associated with the cycle.

  • Burn Rate Factor: The burn rate factor associated with the cycle.

  • Score Factor: The score factor associated with the cycle.

When program calculation rules derive values from the Score Calculation Factors section, values are defined per Cycle, which is the number of times the device has successfully participated in an event during the current cycle (week or month), plus 1. A device's event participation is considered successful in the following circumstances:

• The Event Participation has an Outcome of "Successful Participation".

• The Event Participation has an Outcome of "Canceled".  This happens when a device has been reserved but the event stopped halfway through due to reasons such as, target load control reached. It is considered as a success in customer perspective, since it is the utility that stopped the event which resulted to a cancelled outcome.

• The Event Participation has a blank Outcome and the device was not preemptively opted out of the event (Preemptive Opt-Out is "No" or blank). Posting of an event's outcome may be delayed, and until then the event participation of a reserved device is considered as a success as long as the customer did not opt out before the event transpires.

For instance, if a device has never participated in an event, the algorithms would use the values in the Cycle 1 row. If a device has successfully participated in 3 previous events, the algorithms would use the values in the Cycle 4 row.

System Data

Program rules are based on the system data: