Frontline Systems Launches RASON Decision Services V2020 for Microsoft Power Platform

Frontline Systems, developer of the Solver in desktop Microsoft Excel and the RASON Analytics API, has released RASON Decision Services V2020 – a cloud service that enables companies to easily embed “intelligent decisions” in a manual or automated business process, applying business rules and advanced analytics to reduce costs and mitigate risks, in fields ranging from manufacturing and distribution to energy, pharmaceuticals, investment and insurance.

RASON, an acronym for RESTful Analytic Solver Object Notation, is a high-level, declarative modeling language embedded in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), the popular structured format widely used in web and mobile applications. A REST API at Rason.net enables applications to submit RASON models to Frontline’s servers, solve them and obtain results in JSON – and now OData. Rason.com provides a portal for “point and click” use of the API to create models and data connections and manage models in use.

RASON Decision Services enables creation of decision models powered by a full range of machine learning, optimization and simulation methods, with faster, simpler deployment thanks to best-in-class support for Office 365, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 via the Common Data Service, OneDrive and CData’s Cloud Hub. “We’ve made it easy to combine advanced analytics with business rules and decision tables for intelligent decisions,” says Daniel Fylstra, Frontline’s President and CEO, “and to consume analytic model results as data – in web, mobile, server and desktop applications.”

RASON Decision Services provides everything needed for both advanced analytics and business rules: comprehensive data access, forecasting, text mining, machine learning, Monte Carlo simulation and mathematical optimization. Use of a predictive model as input to a set of business rules – considered an advanced use case in older systems – is simple in RASON Decision Services, where results from any analytics method can be used in decision tables, and decision tables using FEEL, Excel formulas and high-level RASON notation can be used for business logic inside optimization or simulation models.

RASON V2020 enables users for the first time to define multiple “stages” in a single script, where a stage can perform an SQL operation, apply a data transformation, train a machine learning model, apply it to score new data, run a simulation, solve a mathematical optimization problem, or evaluate one or more linked decision tables. Results are passed between stages in a rich, standard “Indexed Data Frame” form. In Frontline’s product roadmap for RASON, such multistage workflows form the basis for a further facility to create reusable models and automate both scheduled runs and on-demand use of such models.