US Patent 9280618 Systems and methods for control strategy criteria selection

The systems and methods perform simulations in a systematic way as to minimize redundant data fetching and computations and reduce run-time. The systems and methods can cache information that can be used across multiple control strategies and speed up the process of simulation by several orders of magnitude. A business analyst can first generate a set of matching criteria that meets business intuition for the specific initiative and set of stores under analysis. A systematic approach in building similar sites models from control strategies that are combinations of this set of matching criteria can be applied to minimize data extraction and processing. The similarity function allows for the distance of each criterion to be combined linearly. Data for each matching criteria only needs to be extracted once but can be used in all control strategies that uses that criteria.