Cycle

Data applications are often used to solve business problems that operate periodically (i.e. in time cycles).

Examples:

• Predictions of sales data for Store X needs to occur weekly
• The master planning of Company A’s supply chain needs to happen monthly
• etc.

For this purpose, Taipy brings the concept of Cycle (or work cycle), which represents a single iteration of such a time pattern. Each cycle has a start date and a duration depending upon the chosen time frequency of the scenarios. In Taipy, scenarios may have a Frequency among:

• Frequency.DAILY
• Frequency.WEEKLY
• Frequency.MONTHLY
• Frequency.QUARTERLY
• Frequency.YEARLY

At its creation, a new scenario is attached to a single cycle, the one that matches its frequency and its creation_date.

Example for January cycle

In our example, the end-user publishes production orders (i.e., a production plan) every month. During each month (the cycle), the end-user will be interested in "playing" with different scenarios untill only one of those scenarios is selected as the official production plan to be published. Using Taipy, each month is modeled as a cycle, and each Taipy cycle can contain one or more Taipy scenarios.

The picture on the left shows the tree of entities: Cycles, Scenarios and their associated Pipeline(s). There is an existing past cycle for December and a current cycle for January containing a single scenario.

When comes the end of a cycle (start date + duration), only one of the scenarios is applied in production. This "official" scenario is called the primary scenario. Only one primary scenario per cycle is allowed.

Example for February cycle

Now the user starts working on the February work cycle. He or she creates two scenarios for the February cycle (one with a low capacity assumption and one with a high capacity assumption). The user can then decide to elect the low capacity scenario as the "officilal" scenario for February. To accomplish that, he just needs to promote the low capacity scenario as primary for the February cycle.

The tree of entities resulting from the various scenarios created is represented in the picture on the left. The underlined scenarios are primary.

Note

Note that cycles are optional. If a scenario has no Frequency, it will not be attached to any cycle.

The attributes of a scenario (the set of pipelines, the cycle, ... ) are populated based on the scenario configuration ScenarioConfig that must be provided when instantiating a new scenario. (Please refer to the configuration details documentation for more details on configuration).

The next section introduces the Job concept.