The Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (commonly referred to as RPAS) is a configurable software platform for developing forecasting and planning applications, following a Client/Server OLAP model. The RPAS platform provides capabilities such as a multidimensional database structure (it follows the MOLAP model), batch and online processing, a configurable slice-and-dice user interface, a sophisticated configurable calculation engine, user security and utility functions such as importing and exporting.
RPAS is the foundation for a significant number of applications that are part of the Oracle Retail solution footprint, such as Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting, Oracle Merchandise Financial Planning, Oracle Assortment Planning, Oracle Item Planning, Oracle Size Profile Optimization, Oracle Replenishment Optimization and Oracle Advanced Inventory Planning.
RPAS currently offers 2 data persistence options: a proprietary datastore based on Oracle Berkeley DB, or an Oracle RDBMS (which supports real time updates from external systems but reduces the performance of the MOLAP cubes). Originally the persistence layer (and some of the processing) was based on a MOLAP engine called Accumate/Acumen, originally developed by Mars Inc. for in house reporting and analysis but latterly owned by Lucent. Accumate is now no longer generally available or in support from Lucent. (Limited sustaining support for Accumate is available from Oracle to support older installations of RPAS that were Accumate based, based on a source code license that was held by the predecessor to Oracle Retail, Retek, with the source code license novated to Oracle for support purposes).