Decision Points and Alternatives

18 July 2005

Decision Points and Alternatives are now available in the Gnosis Transaction Manager.

The capability to model different scenarios using Gnosis Transactions is now available in the latest version of the Gnosis Transaction Manager. Such a capability is very useful for modelling different options or alternatives, in fields such as finance, investment and engineering.

For example an investment may be being considered in plant and equipment at different locations for a utility network. There are different location, plant and other options available in each scenario, and the engineer is interested to evaluate which scenario is the best investment for the existing network. A Decision such as this is well suited to the Gnosis Transaction manager using a Decision Point and Alternatives, where each different scenario is modelled as an Alternative under the same Decision Point. Ultimately one of the scenarios is chosen as the investment decision.

Similarly financial decisions may be considered in relation to an existing database of Policy, Account or other data. The decision on which financial option to choose may depend on many interdependant factors that are combined into each scenario, that play out in the different Gnosis Transaction Alternatives, one of which must be chosen for the decision to be made.

From a relational database perspective, each Alternative must become relationally consistent before it can be chosen or committed into the Decision Point. Or put another way each Alternative must conform to the constraints defined for the database before it can be chosen at the Decision Point. An individual object (such as a row in a table), may be represented in each Alternative under the same Decision Point, which differs from a standard Gnosis Transaction (also referred to as Work), which can only have one unlocked version of the object stored for all Sub Transactions..