This invention addresses the need for dealing with complex planning
calculations based on data warehouse or Planning Data Repository (PDR)
data where some aggregated data or forecast data might be changed without
directly manipulating the underlying data, and where there may be several
relationships linking the data. The system is able to deal with complex
relationships along more than one axis or dimension. A number of
iterations are typically used involving both back-solving and
`forward-solving`. The subset of cells that needs to be recalculated is
identified before steps of back-solving and/or forward-solving using
parent/child tables. The scanning of these tables looking for potential
dependencies is much simpler and faster than to looking at the actual
formulae or functions relating the cells. The step of creating the
parent/child tables is carried out in advance of the actual calculation
by parsing all the relationships (formulae and functions) and summarising
the dependencies between cells in the parent/child tables.