Authorization and Rating Workflow

During rating, the MATRIXX Charging Application creates a candidate list of all owned product offers that can potentially apply. From this candidate list, the price components that can apply are identified and their associated rating formulas are used to perform authorizations and rating, if applicable.

The following operations occur per event segment to authorize and rate events.
  1. A candidate list is created from all product offers owned by the subscriber, its devices, and groups. After the list is created, a product offer is considered valid and is selected based on the following factors; product offers that are not applicable are ignored:
    • The time the event message is received.

      For usage rating that requires authorization, the validity is determined per service context (Diameter MSCC) based on the authorization time. For usage rating that does not require authorization, the validity is determined by the event time. For rating based on catalog item purchases, cancelations, recurring processing, or first use of a balance, the validity is also determined by the event time.

    • The service being used.

      For usage rating, a product offer is considered valid only if it is associated with the service in use. For example, a product offer for voice is not considered valid if the service being used is for data.

    • The device being used.
      For usage rating, a product offer is considered valid only if it is owned by the device in use.
      Note: Recurring discounts in offers owned by a device can only apply to charges owned by that device.
    • The price components it contains.
      For usage rating, a product offer is considered valid if it contains a usage price component. For non-usage rating, it is selected if it contains a price component that is associated with the event type received. For example, when a billing cycle triggers a monthly recurring charge, all product offers that are valid and contain a recurring price component are selected.
      Note: If a product offer contains a purchase or cancel price component, the component is applied from the offer being purchased or canceled.

    After all valid product offers are selected, the relevant price components are selected based on the event message received (usage, recurring, purchase, cancelation, and first use of a balance). For example, usage event messages trigger usage components and purchase event messages trigger purchase components. The price components selected can be from multiple offers.

  2. A list of applicable charges is compiled in the following manner:
    • All product offers are listed in order of priority and examined from highest to lowest priority.
      For the highest priority non-supplemental product offer, if no charge component fails and at least one charge component passes, it is selected. If one charge component fails or all the charges are not applicable, it is considered not applicable. Likewise, if no charge components apply, neither does the product offer. For usage that has already occurred, if there are no non-supplemental product offers that are applicable, a warning is logged and processing continues and the second highest priority product offer is examined, and so on. The selection is based on the following factors:
      • The charge is for the correct event.
      • The charge is associated with one or more balances that are valid and can be impacted.
      • The rate table does not have a skip value.
      • Meters do not stop the charge.
    • Any applicable charges in supplemental product offers are selected based on the same criteria. If a charge is a purchase or cancelation charge, it is applied from the offer being purchased or canceled, regardless of whether it is in a supplemental or non-supplemental product offer.

      Supplemental product offers are always examined, regardless of whether any non-supplemental product offers can be applied. During authorizations for real-time usage, the authorization fails when a charge for a supplemental offer cannot be reserved from the balance. If the usage has already occurred, the supplemental product offers are applied, regardless of whether the non-supplemental offers were applied. In this case, a warning is logged and processing continues.

      Note: An offer can be policy supplemental, but not supplemental for charging. The setting of supplemental compared to non-supplemental is independent for charging, policy, and repository. For more information about supplemental, policy supplemental, and repository supplemental, see the discussion about general product offer properties in My MATRIXX Help.

    If no applicable charges are found during authorization, a no-authorization message is returned to the network. If no valid charges are found during rating, any associated discounts are ignored.

  3. A list of applicable discounts is compiled in the same manner as applicable charges are compiled. The product offers selected for discounts can be different than those selected for charges, for example, when a product offer is applicable for charges and not discounts, or the reverse. For purchase discounts, the discount can only apply to charges in the same offer or the same purchased bundle, because they are purchased one at a time. Note that product offers do not fail because of discount components—they either pass or are not applicable. Discounts do not cause denial of usage authorization unless deny is defined in the selected rate table row. In addition, they do not cause a non-usage operation to fail unless they have an explicit deny in the selected rate table row. The first discount (or set of discounts) that satisfy the event are used.
  4. For purchase pricing, cancelation pricing, recurring pricing, and first use pricing, a list of applicable grants is compiled by going through the product offers in order and selecting the first one that applies. Grant components are handled similarly to offers with discounts, with the following additions: they are not supported for usage pricing and the credit limit is not used in selecting the balance instance to impact. If the grant is a purchase or cancelation component, it is applied from the offer being purchased or canceled, regardless of whether the product offer is non-supplemental or supplemental.
  5. A list of applicable meters is compiled by examining all product offers. A usage meter applies when it is based on usage quantity or event occurrence, or when it is tracking a charge and the balance impacted by the charge exists. If a meter is at the credit limit, the operation can fail (rating or authorization) and prevent charges from being applied.
  6. The rating formulas from the applicable charges, discounts, and meters are combined and evaluated. The evaluation involves examining credit limits and normalizer parameters. If any criterion makes a rating formula not applicable, it is not used.

    From the selected valid balances, MATRIXX Charging Application spreads a charge across multiple balances as needed to apply the entire charge. If the first valid balance that can be impacted does not satisfy the charge, MATRIXX Charging Application uses subsequent valid balances until the entire charge is applied or until the number of valid balances runs out.

  7. The rating formulas from the applicable grants are combined and evaluated. The evaluation involves examining credit limits and normalizer parameters. If any criterion makes the rating formula not applicable, it is not used.
  8. All valid charges and discounts are applied together and all valid grants are applied until the current rating formula set is no longer valid.
At this point, an event segment is created and the same process is performed for each subsequent segment. If a credit limit prohibits the application of the combined rating formula, the segment is not rated and a message is returned to the network. For usage rating, the discounts apply to all charges applied within the event segment. If a subscriber purchases an offer that contains a discount on the charged amount on the main currency, the discount applies only to segments that use that offer.
Note: If multiple discounts are applied and they apply to the remaining charge amount, they are applied to the remaining charge amount one at a time, after each previous discount has been applied. They are applied in no specific order.
For more information about event segmentation, see the discussion about event segmentation during rating.

If a product offer specifies that its price components are dependent, all must be valid to apply. In this case, the MATRIXX Charging Application first examines the charges and any existing meters. If the charge can be applied, the discounts and grants from that product offer (if any) are examined to see if they can be applied rather than examining the lower-priority non-supplemental product offers for price components. It is possible that discounts and grants also get applied from higher-priority non-supplemental offers if those product offers have applicable components of these types.