LUMINA INTRODUCES ANALYTICA DECISION ENGINE 2.0 DEVELOPMENT TOOL
Lumina Decision Systems, a developer of visual software for creating, analyzing, and communicating quantitative business models, introduced Analytica Decision Engine 2.0. Marketed to application developers and corporate IT groups, ADE 2.0 makes it easy for developers to incorporate the sophisticated modeling and probabilistic analysis capabilities of Lumina's Analytica 2.0 Decision Support software into custom applications and web sites.
"In today's competitive and fast-paced business world, we often have to assimilate mountains of data and make crucial decisions on the fly. With ADE 2.0, companies can offer their employees or customers the ability to use a familiar application, such as sales forecasting, to create thousands of "what if" scenarios and then use this information to make complex decisions," said Thomas Tomasetti, CEO of Lumina. "When published on Web sites or corporate intranet, this powerful decision making ability is both a strategic tool and competitive advantage."
ADE 2.0 can be used to enhance analytic and computational capabilities in a wide range of application areas, including e-commerce, financial and sales forecasting, corporate strategy, artificial intelligence, simulation, risk analysis, R&D project evaluation, new venture assessment, environmental cost-benefit tradeoffs, public policy scenario analysis, health-care cost management, and energy exploration.
For example, a version of ADE was the core technology used by Ask Jeeves to provide the natural-language answering services used in its new Shopping Advisor application that is initially being employed by http://www.etown.com.
ADE is based on the proven core technology of Analytica, a sophisticated modeling tool that uses influence diagrams to communicate the flow of information and harnesses the power of Intelligent Arrays to model complex problems. Analytica's graphical interface and standard diagram symbols make it easy for users to create even the most complex models.
The Analytica Decision Engine 2.0 provides several specific features that help users create, calculate, and communicate a decision model. For example, Influence Diagrams can provide an intuitive, visual display of model structure in a far more convenient representation than is possible with a spreadsheet. Hierarchical Diagrams can organize a complicated model into a hierarchy of comprehensible and simple modules. Intelligent Arrays can allow users to easily create and modify models with many dimensions. Risk Analysis and Uncertainty lets developers treat uncertainty explicitly with probabilities. Enterprise-ready Connectivity (ODBC integration) enables access to ODBC-compliant databases and applications, including Microsoft Access, Oracle, Informix, DB2, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), e-commerce systems, and data warehouses.
To provide the widest range of inter-application compatibility, ADE 2.0 is available as both an ActiveX in-process automation server and an ActiveX local automation server. ADE 2.0 runs on Window NT 4.0 or later and is available now through Lumina's web site at http://www.lumina.com. Special introductory pricing for ADE 2.0 is $1,995 (USD) and includes a copy of Analytica Enterprise Edition 2.0.
The Analytica Decision Engine 2.0 provides several features that help users create, calculate, and communicate decision models, including:
Influence Diagrams providing an intuitive, visual display of model structure in a far more convenient representation than is possible with a spreadsheet. Influence diagrams can be used to:
Conceptualize the qualitative structure before developing the mathematical details
Self-document models without an overwhelming display of numbers and formulas
Unlike standard spreadsheets, ADE 2.0 allows users to easily create and modify multidimensional models. Intelligent Arrays can be used to:
Write simple expressions that operate on multidimensional values, for example: adding, or multiplying the values element by element, or summing over a dimension.
Modify the size and number of dimensions, expanding or simplifying to find the best level of detail.
Eliminate the expandability issue of spreadsheets and avoid errors from expanding the number of variables in linked spreadsheets.
Risk Analysis and Uncertainty ADE 2.0 enables users to treat uncertainty explicitly with probabilities and to:
Express uncertainty about any variable by selecting a probability distribution or directly specifying likelihoods with a probability table.
Easily and efficiently propagate uncertainties through the model using Latin hypercube or Monte Carlo sampling.
Compute uncertain results as standard statistics, probability bands, probability density functions, or cumulative probability functions.