Using alloy for verifying the integration of OLAP preferences in a hybrid what-if scenario application

Abstract

Owning the right and high quality set of information is a crucial factor for developing business activities and consequently gaining competitive advantages. However, retrieving information is not enough. The possibility to simulate hypothetical scenarios without harming the business using What-If analysis tools and to retrieve highly refined information is an interesting way of achieving such advantages. Based on this, we designed and developed a specific piece of software especially oriented for discovering the best recommendations for What-If analysis scenarios’ parameters, using OLAP usage preferences. In this paper, we propose a formal description and verification of one of the phases of the hybridization model we developed related to the extraction of OLAP usage preferences. We used Alloy to specify and verify the viability of the process, and discover possible ambiguity and inconsistencies cases.