With Simulations you can run variously complex what-if scenarios, such as simulation of new prices or discounts or estimation of a rebate for the next year. Technically explained, you take the existing Datamart, make a copy which reflects your needs (with just some columns or using aggregation), run simulations and have the results saved in a table. Furthermore, you can calculate additional columns over this result (using a logic).

When defining the calculation, you can choose from active logics defined both in Analytics and Price Setting (to facilitate the use case where a Price Setting pricing logic is reused in a simulation, mapping its inputs from Analytics data).

When you create a Simulation (and deploy it), the system automatically creates three Data Loads:

Refresh Data Load – Populates the simulation's data table from the query defined in the Source & Filters panel.
Simulation Data Load – Applies a logic to the data.
Truncate Data Load – Deletes all rows or a subset of rows from the data table.

Running Simulations in Distributed Mode

To execute the simulations faster, it is possible to run them in the distributed mode, meaning that the task of processing individual Datamart rows is split among several nodes.

Distributed mode can only be used for Datamart rows which have no dependencies and references to other rows. Also, there is no control over the order in which rows are processed.

The distributed mode is controlled at two levels – globally and for each simulation stage.

To enable the distributed mode:

You have to allow it globally first. Go to Analytics > Data Manager > Data Loads and enable the Allow distributed calculation checkbox.
Then you need to set for which simulation stage the distributed mode should be used. Go to Analytics > Simulations > Calculation tab and enable the Allow distributed calculation checkbox for the individual simulation stages.

To disable the distributed mode, you can choose to do it:

For a single simulation stage (in Simulations)
Globally (in Data Loads)