The Planning OLAP Model

A wealth of multidimensional OLAP models has been suggested in the past, tackling various problems of modeling multidimensional data. However, all of these models focus on navigational and query operators for grouping, selection and aggregation. We argue that planning functionality is, next to reporting and analysis, an important part of OLAP in many businesses and as such should be represented as part of a multidimensional model. Navigational operators are not enough for planning, instead new factual data is created or existing data is changed. To our knowledge we are the first to suggest a multidimensional model with support for planning. Because the main data entities of a typical multidimensional model are used both by planning and reporting, we concentrate on the extension of an existing model, where we add a set of novel operators that support an extensive set of typical planning functions