The rules for the new Sickness Benefit require a household's total income to be tested against a maximum threshold (i.e. if the total household income exceeds this threshold, then the case is not eligible).
This threshold will vary over time (as policy makers decide from time to time), so rather than hard-code the threshold into rules, the rule set designer has required that the threshold be stored in a new "Income Limits" rate table. The rates for this year and next year have already been decided.
The administrator creates the new rate table including an effective-dated change when this year's limit will increase to next year's limit.
When finished, the administrator adds the new rate table to the configuration for the Rate Rule Object Propagator (see Rate Rule Objects), and chooses to "Apply Changes" to the new rates.
The system is now configured to create rule objects for the cells in the new Income Limits rate table, and so creates a CER rule object (of class RateRuleSet.RateCell) for each distinct cell in the new rate table. CER stores these new rule objects on its database tables, for later retrieval during the calculation of a case's determination result.
The income threshold rate varies over time, and so the valueTimeline in the rule object reflects both this year's and next year's rate.