Initializing help system before first use

Introduction to Xpress Insight on FICO Platform

This document describes Xpress Insight for FICO® Platform on the FICO® Analytic Cloud (FAC) and provides links to further resources which help with configuration.

FICO® Xpress Insight is used by developers to create visual applications that enable non-technical business users to interact with optimization models and perform in-depth what-if analysis.

Business users work with underlying models using visual components and business terms to specify values for the scenarios they are exploring. Scenarios can be iteratively developed and executed, and their results analyzed.

The Xpress Insight system incorporates several physical components, logical concepts and data artifacts.

Key physical components include:
  • Xpress Insight Server The core service which provides scenario data management, access-control and job scheduling.
  • Xpress Insight Web Client A browser-based user interface to the Xpress Insight system, through which apps and scenarios can be manipulated.
  • Execution Workers Services which execute the custom business logic and analytic models at the core of an Insight app.
Key data artifacts include:
  • Apps Apps are micro-solutions deployed into Xpress Insight to deliver custom decision support solutions. Customized user interface pages, business logic and analytic models are packaged into an app archive for deployment.
  • Models Insight apps operationalize analytic models in a decision support context to enable business users to interact with the models. The main model in an app also implements the business logic of the solution.
  • Scenarios Scenarios contain the input data for the model and its results. A scenario must be loaded before its input data can be initialized, and executed before its results can be examined.

Xpress Insight is available as an on-premises installation to be managed and administered by your corporate IT department. Alternatively, it is also available through the FICO Analytic Cloud, a hosted and managed environment. Xpress Insight is available only for the FICO Platform hosted on the FICO Analytic Cloud.

Platform Structure

Solutions provide a logical grouping for the components available to your company and are used to organize the components that can be assigned to users. The diagram below illustrates the relationship of the different elements.
Note: The FICO Analytic Cloud is shown as a broken line on the diagram to represent its position in the platform structure. On-premises installations should disregard this element.
A solution can contain one or many components and may accommodate multiple individual instances of a component. Platform components provide capabilities that can be added to your solutions. Xpress Insight is available as a component in an enterprise solution intended for multiple users within a given organization. The diagram below shows how an on-premises installation could structure the solutions with two Xpress Insight components to service two departments within an organization.
Each component provides specific functionality and capabilities that can be configured to interact with other components that have been added to your solutions. Some components expose one or more web services that can be called from a batch job or from an external application. Xpress Insight apps are frequently authored to fulfill specific requirements of your organization.
Note: For more on authoring Xpress Insight apps, see the Insight 5 Mosel Developer Guide or the Insight 5 Python Developer Guide.

Solution and Component Administration

The Solution Administrator configures, deploys, and manages your solutions and any components added to them. This role also manages which users can access a solution. In addition to administering access to the Insight component, the Solution Administrator also configures Execution Services. For more see the later section on Administering Execution Workers and Services.

Additionally, each individual component can be assigned an Administrator who manages which permissions a user has when they are using the component. These tasks are covered in the Insight 5 Administrator Guide.

Execution and Capacity

Xpress Insight on FICO® Platform uses dynamic execution workers that are deployed to meet the demands of your component. The specifications, configuration, and number of simultaneous workers is defined by your service contract.

New execution workers are deployed if there are queued jobs that cannot be serviced by the existing pool of workers. Deploying new workers in response to queued jobs can take several minutes as the workers are commissioned. Each worker has an idle time of one hour. After one hour of inactivity, the worker is decommissioned automatically, and does not need to be manually deprovisioned.

Parent Topic Insight 5 FICO Platform Component Guide

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