New DecisionTools Industrial Features RISKOptimizer

INNOVATIVE QUANT PROGRAM SIMULATES OPTIMUM RESULTS

Newfield, NY - May 22, 2003. Palisade Corporation announces the release of the DecisionTools Suite® Industrial, a new addition to its popular Excel add-in line for risk and decision analysis. DecisionTools 4.5 Industrial features the innovative RISKOptimizer. Now the decision makers who use these quantitative tools will be able to simulate possible outcomes of a certain course of action and at the same time arrive at the best of all possible simulation outcomes.

In addition to RISKOptimizer, DecisionTools Industrial incorporates the five add-in programs available in the Standard and Professional versions of the DecisionTools Suite.

Industrial Adds What’s Best? to What-If?
@RISK, the primary risk analysis tool in the suite, uses Monte Carlo simulation to predict the answers to What If? questions, decisions and process scenarios that involve uncertain factors. It does not, however, try different values for certain, controllable factors to arrive at a desired outcome. While most spreadsheet optimization programs are very good at finding a specified goal—that is, What’s Best?—they cannot handle uncertain values. RISKOptimizer is a hybrid tool that simulates at the same time it optimizes, and it selects the simulation with results closest to optimum. This makes it very useful for approaching a true dilemma, a problem that turns on a number of uncertainties but also has a desired solution.

Industrial Comes with @RISKAccelerator Too!
Because it’s likely that users of DecisionTools Industrial will often need to run very large simulations, the new product also includes @RISKAccelerator, Palisade’s parallel processing solution. With @RISKAccelerator, simulations are run using all available CPUs within a given PC, thereby reducing simulation times.

The Other Tools in Industrial
As a new component of DecisionTools, RISKOptimizer joins five very popular add-ins for quantitative decision support.:

@RISK, the risk analysis and simulation tool, tells you not only what could happen in a given situation, but how likely it is to happen. Its Monte Carlo simulations result in a distribution of possible outcomes and the probability of getting those outcomes. Simulation results can be displayed as high-resolution graphs and in a full statistical report.

PrecisionTree® creates influence diagrams and decision trees in an existing Excel spreadsheet. Influence diagrams allow the user to see the components of a problem, and decision trees model the sequence of events. PrecisionTree uses Sensitivity Analysis to pinpoint which decision factors are most important.

TopRank® automatically determines which spreadsheet cells have the most influence on simulation results and ranks them in order of importance. It features the capacity for multi-way What-If analysis. Results can be displayed as Tornado graphs and in full statistical report.

BestFit® is the distribution fitting solution. It can analyze up to 100,000 data points or pairs and find the distribution function that best fits that data. The program tests up to 26 distribution types using advanced optimization algorithms. Results are displayed graphically, and the statistical report includes goodness-of-fit statistics.

RISKview® is a powerful tool for viewing, assessing, and creating probability distributions. It can be used to draw probability functions and then place them in @RISK simulations.

Essential Facts
The DecisionTools Suite Is Available in 3 Versions: DecisionTools 4.5 Industrial is the third version of the Suite. It also comes in Standard and Professional versions. All versions include @RISK 4.5 Professional, BestFit 4.5, and RISKview 4.5. The Standard version adds the standard versions of TopRank and PrecisionTree, while the Professional and Industrial versions include the professional versions of these programs. DecisionTools Industrial adds RISKOptimizer Industrial as well as built-in @RISKAccelerator to utilize all available CPUs in a single machine during simulation.

System Requirements: IBM PC compatible Pentium or higher; Microsoft Windows 95 or higher; Excel 97 or higher; 32 MB RAM free.

Technical Support: Free for first 30 days, then available through Maintenance Plan.

Test Drive the Demo Today!

» Click here to try out the new DecisionTools Suite.