Sensai Apps brings AI assistance directly into AIMMS Developer, built on top of AIMMS's established Operations Research platform. This article walks through a first hands-on session: connecting AIMMS Developer to Sensai, opening the Sensai chat in a new project, asking Sensai to create and apply a small skill, and reviewing exactly what it changed — including the skill definition it saved for reuse.

This article covers:

• Preparing for Sensai Apps
• Opening Sensai Apps in a new project
• Specifying a small skill
• Observing the results
• The skill definition

Prerequisites

• A license for AIMMS Developer version 26.4 or later.
• Access to an AIMMS cloud with Sensai activated.

Preparing for Sensai Apps

Step 1: Open AIMMS Developer and choose Tools > Cloud Login.

Step 2: In the “Sign in to AIMMS Cloud” dialog, enter the cloud account you're allowed to use — in this example, chriskuip.aimms.cloud — and press Sign in. This opens a browser window to complete the sign-in; if the dialog briefly shows “Sign-in failed, please try again” as in the screenshot below, just retry — it typically succeeds on the next attempt.

Step 3: Connect the device. In the browser, approve the request:

Pressing Approve gives AIMMS Developer access:

Step 4: Back in AIMMS Developer, the Tools menu now shows Cloud Logout instead of Cloud Login — confirming you're signed in.

Opening Sensai Apps in a New Project

With access to Sensai, you can open the Sensai chat via the Tools menu:

In a new project, the opening window looks like this:

To get acquainted, you can ask Sensai a few questions, for example:

Specifying a Small Skill

In my User Support role, I often create a small AIMMS example to illustrate or test a particular feature. I like that example to be structured consistently from the start.

That's why I group the initialization and termination procedures together, and extend the time-duration quantity with some commonly used time units — every time I start a new project. Instead of doing this by hand each time, I asked Sensai to turn it into a reusable skill:

I want to define a new skill: initproject - which adapts a new project.

This skill should start creating a new section named "app_start_stop" and then

move the procedures MainInitialization, PostMainInitialization, PreMainTermination, and MainTermination into that section.

Next it should open the Quantity SI_Time_Duration and add the conversions for week, day, and hour (one conversion per line, and they are separated by commas).

Can you create that skill and subsequently test it?

Sensai Apps immediately got to work:

Observing the Results

...and quickly came back with results:

Sensai's response includes a proactive style note, boxed in blue above — I find that useful.

The Model Explorer confirmed the new section and its procedures:

And the SI_Time_Duration quantity showed the updated conversions:

Note: the minute conversion wasn’t part of the request — it was already present in SI_Time_Duration when the project was created (AIMMS PRO and AIMMS WebUI add it by default). Sensai only added the week, day, and hour conversions that were actually asked for.

# Skill: initproject

When asked to adapt a new project:

1. Create a new section named `app_start_stop`.

2. Move the procedures `MainInitialization`, `PostMainInitialization`, `PreMainTermination`, and `MainTermination` into that section.

3. Open the quantity `SI_Time_Duration` and update its `conversions` attribute so it contains one conversion per line, separated by commas, adding conversions for hour, day, and week.

4. Compile the model.

5. Verify that section `app_start_stop` contains the four procedures and that `SI_Time_Duration` contains the expected conversions.