Product Updates

SC Navigator 24.12.1Date October 11, 2024 New Features A new attribute has been created on the Customer Product Data sheet: ‘Minimum Lead Time Adherence’. This attribute determines what percentage of demand for a given customer, location, product, period combination must be fulfilled within the lead time. When you want the model to take this into account, you have to Relax Lead Time on the Control Panel page. Improvements The custom objectives of type “Risk” are no longer shown on the control panel page. There would never be data for those custom objectives, so keeping it there could lead to potential confusion. The Risk Analysis page is now initialized after a Risk Analysis is loaded. We received some feedback based on the changes implemented in SC Navigator 24.11.1, so we made some minor changes to the behavior of the “Filter by Node Type”: If you (un)select one of the four standard elements (Customer, Supplier, Warehouse, Production), it will (un)select all the groups of the type. This will now also happen if you have elements that do not belong to a subgroup. Elements that don’t belong to any group, can be shown by unchecking every subgroup, while keeping the related standard element checked. Groups for which only part of the locations are shown, will now have a gray background in the checkbox and a tooltip to indicate that only some of the related locations are shown. The full behavior is described in Node Filters. Bug Fixes After loading an Excel template (without saving it as a dataset), the widgets on page Data - Customer did not all update correctly when making demand adjustments. Now, the Selected Demand widget refreshes after each Adjust Demand iteration and the table Demand Adjustment updates correctly as well. For Risk Analysis, Profit Decrease is now the same as Cost Increase in case there is no revenue. Previously in this case the Profit Decrease was opposite to the Cost Increase. The attribute ‘Open As Group’ was not included in the template. Curly bracket support for ‘Mode of Transport’ was not working correctly for Custom Cost attributes. Curly bracket support for ‘To Location’ in Stepwise Transport Cost was not working correctly. When not applying variable cost for a warehouse that is at the same location as a production facility, users could get an error message after optimization: “A problem occurred during the optimization. (…)” Previously, when reading input from an Excel file, an empty cell in the first column of a sheet was not properly handled. SC Navigator would not give an error message, while it stopped reading the sheet. In this new version, it will give an error message, indicating that an empty cell was found. On page Data, in the Data Dashboard widget, Suppliers and Supplier groups were not counted correctly. The geocoding did not work correctly if you specified a Postal Code and Country, but not a country-code. In that case, the model was using a special postal-code setup, while that required a country code. This resulted in inaccurate results; in some cases the returned locations were even outside the requested country. The file “_dataset_info.parquet”, created as part of a results dataset, still contained capitals and spaces in the header names. In newly generated results, these headers will now only use lower case and underscores in the names. Some exported parquet files contained columns starting with “unit_of_” that were not expected. These columns will no longer be generated in exported results. In some cases with minimum production, the model could be incorrectly marked as infeasible or display the message “A problem occurred during the optimization.”

Dear Community,We are excited to share the upcoming enhancements to the WebUI, designed to enrich its features and capabilities.Introducing Table (Table V2) with Enhanced ControlsWe are thrilled to announce the launch of the enhanced Table widget, now equipped with modern option editors that allow per-identifier and per-index configurations. This upgrade provides greater control over settings like Decimal Places, Show Units, and Visibility for individual content identifiers while retaining all the existing Table functionalities.With these enhancements, you can now:Control Decimal Places and decide whether to show or hide units for each individual content identifier.We’ve also introduced the “Visibility” feature for content identifiers. In addition to the current behavior of showing only sparse data, this feature enables:Displaying cells for elements included in the table, even if the data is empty or zero. Hiding or excluding data for specific identifiers within the table.The Visibility feature is particularly useful when working with multiple identifiers in the table. You can control which cells are available for user input based on the elements from certain identifiers, allowing you to selectively enable input cells from other identifiers, thus offering more flexibility in data entry scenarios.These enhancements lay the groundwork for future improvements, such as:Hiding specific indices in table headers. Providing information about multiple selected cells.These updates are available as an experimental feature called Table V2. When the Table V2 feature flag is enabled, any new tables added to your application will use the upgraded version. Existing tables will automatically render with Table V2 as well.If needed, you can safely turn off the Table V2 feature and return to the earlier version, with all your tables rendering in their original state.We encourage you to try out Table V2 and share your feedback with us!Here’s an illustration of the upgraded Table widget. More detailed information about Table V2 and its features will be shared in the documentation.  Upgraded Text WidgetWe are excited to announce that the Text widget has been upgraded with a new version of its underlying library, bringing enhanced content editor controls to further elevate your experience.This upgrade offers new features such as: Headers: Organize your text with various header levels for clear structure. Indentation: Improve readability by indenting text to highlight nested information. Superscript and Subscript: Easily format text to display as superscript or subscript, useful for mathematical expressions and annotations. Code and Comments Support: Embed code snippets and comments seamlessly, aiding in providing clear technical instructions. Importantly, all your existing Text widget content will render seamlessly with this newer version, ensuring a smooth transition.These enhancements offer greater flexibility and precision in presenting information within your applications.Here’s an illustration of the upgraded Text widget content editor controls.  Promoting Widget Named Views feature, Diagram Widget type, and Tabbed Widget type to General AvailabilityWe are excited to announce that Widget Named Views feature, Diagram Widget, and Tabbed Widget types, previously released as experimental features, are now being promoted to general availability!Over the past months, we have gathered valuable feedback and implemented enhancements to these features. Based on your input and our continuous improvements, we are confident that these features are now ready for broader use.  We recognise your excitement about the upcoming features and will keep you updated as the WebUI Library 24.11 version release is made.We believe that these improvements will improve your applications and provide a better overall user experience.Your feedback and suggestions are highly valued. Feel free to explore the new features and share your thoughts with the community. Thanks,Team WebUI.

SC Navigator 24.11.1Date September 13, 2024 Improvements Upon completion of the optimization run, SC Navigator will now popup a system notification, indicating that the solver is ready. This is useful when solving the model takes a lot of time and your are doing something else in the mean time. You can turn this off on the Control Panel page. Please note that the first time, you have to select in your browser that you allow this page to send notifications. On page Results, on the View Options side panel, the behavior of the “Filter by Node Type” has been adjusted. The new behavior is as follows: SC Navigator shows those locations for which all groups, to which this element belongs, are checked. (In the past, it was primarily based on checking/unchecking one group, but it was not clear to the user which group that was.) If you (un)select one of the four standard elements (Customer, Supplier, Warehouse, Production), it will (un)select all the groups of the type. This will not happen if you have elements that do not belong to a subgroup. If you unselect a subgroup, it will not impact the related standard element. (If you do that, item 1 will turn them all off). The table no longer shows an icon for groups that have multiple node types. We changed this behavior to better handle the situation where multiple node types are located in one place, as well as the situation where groups contain multiple node types. For rate card input data, it is now possible to define negative values. This allows for defining a formula for your rate card cost with a negative component in it (e.g. ax - b). The resulting rate card lane unit cost do need to be non-negative. The data validation has been updated accordingly: instead of checking the input data itself, the rate card lane unit cost is calculated and only when that is negative, it will result in an error. We removed some unnecessary blank columns from the Excel Template. Furthermore, on sheets with an ‘Attribute’ column, the ‘Description of the attribute’ column is now aligned with the ‘Attribute’ column. During data validation, when an incorrect date format is used, the following error message will now be displayed: “The attributes ‘Start Date’ and ‘End Date’ need to be valid dates in a date format. That is not the case for date with name …”. The documentation on the Infeasibility Analysis has been improved. You can now read in more detail what you can do to find the cause of an infeasibility. The documentation on the End To End Results has been improved, such that it is more clear what the data in the table represents. Bug Fixes On page Results - Production, in the top-right corner, the Bill of Material filter is now applied to the production volume chart. This allows for a more granular view of production data based on specific Bill of Materials produced in a production resource. Previously, internal flows could occur at locations with two or more warehouses, even if those warehouses lacked inventory capabilities and the location did not have production facilities. This is no longer possible, as internal flows are now restricted under these conditions.

SC Navigator 24.10.1Date August 20, 2024 New Features A new attribute has been added to the Supplier, Supplier Product, Warehouse, Warehouse Product and Production sheets: Open As Group. This attribute allows you, in multi-period models, to indicate that the entity needs to be open or closed for the complete period. There are two benefits compared to how it could be done previously: It it easier to specify and it leads to faster performance. Improvements The documentation has been restructured for easier navigation. Data Validation will raise an error when the input data includes demand for a product that has no available supply, production, or opening inventory. For some of the rate card data validations, the maximum number of detailed data validation messages has been set to 10000 in order to limit time spent on data validation. In the Node Type filters, all customer groups are now by default colored with color “Customer Default”. The color of the groups can still be changed on the ‘Customize Nodes’ dialog page that you can open from the Map widget action ‘Customize Nodes’. Bug Fixes On page Results - End to End, the direct transport lanes (from supplier to customer) were not visible on the map. When running the infeasibility analysis for a model with multi-step suppliers that do not have capacities specified, the warning message “A problem occurred during the optimization” could appear. When running the infeasibility analysis for a model with customers that have attribute Maximum # of Source Locations set, the message “No solution found - The model is still infeasible” could appear. Now, this constraint is also handled properly in the Infeasibility Analysis. For curly production group data, previously the app raised a data validation warning if any step in the individual productions had missing availability data. However, it should only need the availability data for the first step. In some rare situations, a dataset saved with the previous version of SC Navigator, could no longer be loaded. This has been fixed in this new version of SC Navigator, but it requires you to save the dataset again, from the template. With this release a new version of Inventory Planning is released as well. In the Inventory Planning app, when exporting a scenario, the Work in Progress data is now saved to the data lake as well.

SC Navigator 24.9.1Date July 30, 2024 New Features If the model has Data Separation and the user is connected to multiple business units/groups, SC Navigator will now show a new item (Business Unit) on the status bar. Users can switch between their different groups using this item. Improvements We have improved the loading of results, for results saved in this version. The results of the selected CoG Trade-Off Analysis runs can now be exported. In “System Configuration”, we have removed the “Conversion to Data Lake” page as it is no longer needed. Additionally, the ability to change the data source by clicking on the status bar “Data Source” item has been disabled. A new option has been added to the Whiteboard Edit Node Info dialog, allowing users to disable the creation of groups for nodes that contain a single Supplier, Production, Warehouse, or Customer. The exported parquet files have new attributes names going forward, to allow for better support by data platforms like BigQuery and Databricks. The new attributes are all lower case letters (a-z) and underscores, so no more spaces and parentheses. In the generated input definition file “Parquet File Definition SC Navigator.xlsx” (see Download Parquet File Structure) and the generated output definition file “parquet-results-definition.xlsx”, both the old and the new attribute names are present. SC Navigator input parquet files support both names right now, while output files will only use the new names. Bug Fixes When running Trade-Off Analysis or CoG Trade-Off Analysis simultaneously with a Location Risk Analysis, the error message: “awf.data.aimms.session: There already exists a file or directory named…” will no longer appear.

Dear Community,We are excited to announce the release of AIMMS WebUI Library 24.9.1 version, featuring several exciting new enhancements and improvements designed to elevate your user experience. Here's a detailed overview of what's new: New “Iframe” widget type We have introduced a new widget type, called “Iframe Widget”. This widget makes it possible to embed external content, such as reports and other web pages, directly into your AIMMS WebUI application. For details about this widget, please see the documentation. Here is an example of a Power BI report embedded through the Iframe widget on the AIMMS WebUI page.   Support for “End-User Mode” preview We have learned that previewing the WebUI application from the end users' perspective while building or modifying it is neither quick nor convenient. To address this, we have introduced a new "End-User Mode Preview" button in the page header section. Clicking this button opens the current WebUI page in a new tab, displaying it from the end users' perspective.   Support for WebUI browser notification  The AIMMSWebUI library has been enhanced with a new   webui::RequestShowNotification(message, title)  procedure. This feature allows the WebUI to trigger operating system notifications directly from the browser window in which it is running. An example use case is that you can call this procedure after a solve action in an AIMMS procedure to notify the user that the optimization has been completed. Please note that both your system and the browser settings are configured to allow notifications for your WebUI application. See the documentation for more details.   Diagram widget enhancement: Support for Arcs restriction  We have recognized the importance of enhancing the customer experience by including restrictions on drawing arcs from certain source or destination nodes. This functionality is now achievable using the domain condition of the arc's identifier. Specifically: If a connection between two nodes is not within the index domain, the target node will not display any target feedback (e.g., a blue rectangle). If a certain node cannot have any outgoing connections, it will not be possible to create a new arc starting from that node.   We hope these features enhance your applications and contribute to an even better user experience. Your feedback and suggestions are highly valued, so please share them in the comments. Thanks,Madhu KrishnappaAIMMS WebUI Product Owner

SC Navigator 24.8.1Date July 19, 2024 Improvements The option ‘Results visible for everyone’ is now available when saving CoG Trade-Off results. On page Data - Production, 2 new tables were added with input attributes that were already in the template, but not yet visible in the app: Bill of Material Data and Production Routing Data. On page Data - Other, 3 new tables were added with input attributes that were already in the template, but not yet visible in the app: Bill of Material Groups, Mode of Transport Groups, and Use Description. On the Whiteboard, transport lanes that are not permitted, can no longer be drawn. E.g. lanes from warehouses to suppliers. Bug Fixes In version 24.7.1, attribute Inter Resource Number of Trips was added to sheet “Inter Resource Transport”, while it should have been added to sheet “Transport Cost”. It is now in that sheet, and the sheet “Inter Resource Transport” is not longer in the results file.

Dear Community,I’d like to highlight the WebUI enhancements introduced in the recent WebUI library releases. Here's a quick overview: Enhancements to Table widgetSupport for Store-Focus and Item-Actions on Header cellsThe store focus mechanism has been extended to include row and column header cells. Now, when you click on a row or column header cell, the element parameters of the indices present in the clicked header cell will be updated.Additionally, the Table widget now supports item actions when clicking in the row or column header of the table. For more details, refer to the documentation.Support for HTML data on TableBased on user feedback, we understood the need for presenting HTML content within tables. Previously, string content containing HTML tags was rendered as plain text, limiting the ability to display formatted information.To address this, we introduced the webui::IsHtml annotation for String parameters. When set to True, the Table widget interprets HTML tags within the content, rendering it according to the markup instructions. This results in properly formatted text being displayed, enhancing the presentation of table data. For more details, refer to the documentation.Additionally, we now support custom display text, including HTML content, for Identifiers and Indices. For more detailed information, refer to the documentation.Enhancement to the Copy-Paste functionalityThe Table widget now allows copying content from a single cell and pasting it onto a block of cells or multiple scattered cells.Support for Table filtering on Dialog pageIt is now possible to use Table filtering on Table widgets that are displayed on a Dialog page. New “Tabbed” widget typeWe have created a new widget type, called the ‘Tabbed Widget’. This widget allows you to show multiple pages inside a single widget, as separate tabs. This can serve as a cleaner solution than using hidden widgets on a page, as it allows you to display anything you need within the same space on a WebUI page, depending on the context. For full details, please see the documentation. OthersPre-defined identifier webui::ClientBrowserLanguageThe WebUI library now includes the webui::ClientBrowserLanguage pre-defined identifier, which provides information about the customer’s browser language. App developers can leverage this information to deliver language-specific content in the UI. For details, please see the documentation. We hope these features enhance your applications and contribute to an even better user experience. Your feedback and suggestions are highly valued, so please share them in the comments. Thanks,Madhu KrishnappaAIMMS WebUI Product Owner

SC Navigator 24.7.1Date June 24, 2024 New Features The ‘CoG’ and the ‘CoG Trade-Off’ functionalities have been extended with the ability to do a Constrained CoG. The Constrained CoG allows you to perform CoG calculations, but it can include capacity constraints on the number of CoGs, the new CoG throughput, the existing Warehouses, and the existing Suppliers. Please know that a constrained CoG model is a simplified model to determine potential warehouse locations, and you are advised to run the generated CoG solution through the full SC Navigator model. More information on Constrained CoG can be found in the documentation. From now on, Scenario Batch runs can be run in parallel in the background, allowing the user to use other features of the software while waiting for the results of the Batch Run. The number of concurrent solver sessions in your license will determine how many solves can be run in parallel. Please contact your account manager if you would like to increase the number of concurrent solver sessions. Improvements On page Data - Manage Data, a new column (# Results) has been added to the tables Input Datasets and Scenarios, so that you can see the number of Results datasets that are build on top of this dataset/scenario. On page Data - Manage Data, the Results table did not show Results Dataset that somebody else created, but did not share. They are now all shown, so that they can be deleted if needed. On page Results - Transport, the ‘Number of Trips’ column is added to the ‘Primary Transportation’, ‘Secondary Transportation’, ‘Direct Transportation’, and ‘InterResource Transportation’ tables. The number of trips is calculated based on the volume and the average load size. On page Control Panel, in the Model Control table, the ‘Optimality Gap for Optimization’ value is now shown with all digits in the tooltip. Bug Fixes On pages Results - ‘Cost to Serve’ and ‘End To End’, the ‘Customer Revenue’ was the average revenue (by period) instead of the actual revenue. An “-” in the name of a custom objective could lead to a situation where the custom objective was not calculated at all. The Product Filter on production-related pages did not include all the production-related products. This issue also had an effect on the maps showing Production locations. Production locations with all products unselected were still shown on the map, and the volume shown on the tooltip of the Production location was not correct. It is now possible to download the template from the Whiteboard without location data (a warning will be given instead of a fatal error). This makes it possible to make use of Excel while providing the location data. On page Results - Transport, the Volume by Mode of Transport chart showed all transport modes instead of only the available ones. During the development of CoG Trade-Off some bugs appeared in the normal Trade-Off Analysis which are now fixed.

SC Navigator 24.6.1Date June 10, 2024 New Features The rate card functionality has been extended with two new attributes: Rate Card From and Rate Card To. This allows the user to model zone rate cards that have different prices depending on the origin (e.g. country/state) and destination (country/state) combination. For more details please read about Rate Card Related Attributes in the documentation. Improvements On the Load Data dialog page, we’ve improved the Upload Excel File experience. After selecting your Excel file, this file will directly be uploaded and you no longer have to explicitly click on the Upload widget again. This will prevent users from accidentally clicking the Load (dataset) button when trying to upload an Excel file. We have added two new sections to the SC Navigator documentation: Best Practices and Data Integration. The Best Practices section contains articles on using SC Navigator to address various supply chain challenges. The Data Integration section provides guidance on setting up data integration between SC Navigator and external data sources. We will continue to add more articles to these sections in the future. On pages Results - Cost to Serve and End to End, the System Cost is now split into four different categories: Supply System Cost, Production System Cost, Warehouse System Cost, and Transport System Cost. We have improved how some data was stored in the Azure Data Lake. As a result, the first time you open the application will take a little bit longer. In the Node Type filters, you can now filter for Customer and Supplier groups in addition to Production or Warehouse groups. This also means that if your Customer and Supplier nodes are part of a group, they will now use the new group coloring. Bug Fixes In some rare situations, AIMMS SC Navigator could throw you out of the application (bringing you back to the login page) when loading a dataset, for no reason at all. Now you can continue to use the app after the dataset is loaded. On the Edit Supplier Node Info dialog that can be accessed from within the Whiteboard page, the Supported Products selection was empty by default in case of a model without any Raw Material. Now, by default the Finished Product Group will be selected in this case. After running the Infeasibility Analyzer, the KPI Summary dialog can show a very high or low objective value. This is caused by the violation penalty that the Infeasibility Analyzer uses to solve the model. However, this information was not visible on the KPI Summary dialog. An additional row is now added to the top left table there, containing the violation penalty. The cost values are now consistent with the objective value, also when an infeasibility analysis is run.

Hi all, We are happy to announce the release of Ratio and Count constraints for the Network Design Advanced module.AIMMSian @emilyschutze wrote a blog about how you can use Ratio and Count constraints: https://www.aimms.com/story/introducing-advanced-constraints-in-aimms-sc-navigator/Do you have scenarios or use cases where ratio and/or count constraints can be used? We like to hear from you! Regards,Zoe

SC Navigator 24.5.1Date May 21, 2024 New Features Ratio constraints have been added for Suppliers, Productions, Warehouses, and Transport Lanes, allowing the SC Navigator optimization model to capture business rules better. You can use this feature via the new sheets in the template: Supplier Ratio, Production Routing Ratio, Warehouse Ratio, and Transport Ratio. You can read more about Ratio Constraint Attributes in the SC Navigator documentation. A new attribute ‘Maximum Road Distance To Retrieve’ can now be specified for any transport mode on the ‘Mode of Transport’ sheet in the template. As a result, when retrieving road distance data, if a lane is using a mode of transport for which Maximum Road Distance To Retrieve has been specified and the straight line distance for that lane is greater than the Maximum Road Distance To Retrieve, then the distance is not retrieved and the straight line distance will be used for that lane. Next to the Trade-Off Analysis that we introduced earlier this year, you can now also do a Center of Gravity Trade-Off Analysis. You can do this on the new Center of Gravity sub page ‘CoG Trade-Off’. You can set up and run multiple Center of Gravity runs here. During the runs the user can continue the work at other parts of SC Navigator and can return to check the results when the runs are ready. For more information, please read Center of Gravity Trade-Off Analysis in the documentation. Improvements A new data validation warning has been introduced to indicate whether the roundtrip attribute is used for lanes other than inter-resource lanes. The behavior of Download Solution on the Save Results Data dialog has changed. Previously, it would only export the current data to an Excel file. However, in the new version you can export multiple results datasets to a single Excel file. You can read in the documentation how to use Download Solution for downloading multiple results datasets. You can now also filter data in tables on dialog pages. For instance, this allows you to use filtering when trying to select an input or results dataset. Bug Fixes On page Trade-off Analysis, the selected secondary y-axis was not saved into the Trade-Off Analysis Results Datasets, so when the saved data was loaded, the secondary y-axis was not initialized properly. On page Center of Gravity, for the Cost Breakdown widget, the bar colors are now consistent with the legend colors. The validation logic for country codes (on the Location sheet) now checks both the “Country” and “Country Code” columns to ensure data integrity. Previously, it only checked the ‘Country’ column. If one or more of the following attributes on the Location sheet contained only empty spaces: “Street”, “City”, “Postal Code”, “State”, or “Country”, the generated geo coordinates could not be saved to the database. On page Results - End To End, the table contained a column called ‘Warehouse’. This column is now correctly named ‘Production’. The playback action of the period slider could sometimes skip periods. The element ‘cts_e2e_dummy’ was included in the “End to End Report”. This is an internally generated element that should not have been included in that report. Uploading an Excel template with extensive data in the Supplier Product sheet could be extremely slow. We have adjusted an internal solver setting to improve the performance. However, in the unlikely situation that this change negatively impacts the performance, please contact us for assistance. Previously, exporting CoGs to the SC Navigator dataset would assign excessive transportation cost data. Now, when exporting CoGs, they will inherit the relevant transportation cost data from their associated location group.

In order to optimize our AIMMS releases we are separating the WebUI component from the AIMMS engine. From AIMMS version 24.4 and onwards the WebUI will become a repository library instead of a system library. This means that WebUI will not be included by default anymore in the upcoming AIMMS releases and will have a separate release cycle.      How you are going to experience it?      For WebUI applications, developed in AIMMS versions older than 24.4   Upon your first opening of your WebUI app, developed in a version older than AIMMS 24.4, the WebUI repository library will be downloaded and you will see this message:     It is important to save the project.   If the project has not been saved you will be prompted to do it once more upon closing or upon going to the Library manager, seeing this message:       In the library manager itself you will see WebUI already as a part of your Repository libraries:      If you are about to publish the project on PRO in version 24.4 or later, you need to make sure you export the .aimmspack in version 24.4 or later.     For new applications you are creating in AIMMS 24.4 and later     Upon creating your project you will still need to choose between WebUI and WinUI:      Upon choosing WebUI, the WebUI repository library will be added to your project:      Troubleshooting    In order for the above process to happen smoothly you need to have Internet connection and access to https://library-repository.aimms.com In case you upload onto the PRO portal an .aimmspack in version 24.4 or later, but exported in a version older than 24.4, you will have the following error message when you try running the application:         If you have any further questions please contact us on support@aimms.com. 

Our REST Service for Tasks now contains scheduling functionality, including an option to schedule repeated execution of Tasks. I trust you will find many creative applications for this new feature, such as periodic automatic data import and processing, triggering automated optimization workflows, etc.Please let us know your use case!Link to documentation

SC Navigator 24.4.1Date March 19, 2024 New Features The System Configuration app has a new page "Case Management". This allows you to move Results Datasets (that are not shared) from one user to another. This is needed, when one user leaves their role and another user is taking over this role and needs access to the saved results. Improvements Data validation is added for the Whiteboard feature. Now, before the template is downloaded, the application will automatically validate the data and if any issues are found, it will show these in dialog. Another new data validation was added to the model. It will now give an error when there is a location without any supplier, warehouse, production, or customer on it, but there is a lane defined for it. The tooltip of the "Help" button in the bottom right corner (on the status bar) now indicates that it guides you to both the documentation and the release notes. On the Save Results Data dialog for saving Trade-Off Analysis Results, the "Results visible to everyone" switch is added, such that you can now also share Trade-Off Analysis results with other users. We improved the Trade-off Analysis code from a technical point of view, such that we can modify it more easily in the future. The performance of models with a high number of locations has been improved. Bug Fixes In rare instances, after running an optimization, it is possible to receive the warning message "A problem occurred during the optimization (...)". This message occurs when the app concludes that for that specific situation, it used too strict constraints during the optimization. We have adapted the model such that the constraints are no longer too strict in this case. The "Production Routing" Minimum and Maximum Capacity were incorrectly scaled when loaded from a dataset created in version 24.2.1 up to 24.3.3. Those datasets will continue to have this problem, however after this fix newly created datasets will not have this problem. When you use "Production Routing" Minimum and/or Maximum Capacities, we advise you to reload your data from your Excel template and save it as a new dataset with this new version of SC Navigator. After the recent update of the map colors, some custom node and arc color settings were prompting a warning message stating that a color "is not an element of the checked set Map_ColorPalette". Custom map color settings will no longer cause this warning. After a dataset or results dataset was deleted, the name was not removed from all lists, so it could still be visible. On page Center of Gravity, in rare cases, the algorithm behind the Solve Max Drive Time button could result in an Error: "The model was not solved, most likely due to an infeasibility". This could happen when some locations were distant from real cities, such that the algorithm was not able to generate a viable CoG location within the specified Maximum Drive Time. These distant location are now considered themselves as possible CoG locations, such that the model that is part of the algorithm, is no longer infeasible. On page Center of Gravity - CoG Settings, in widget General Settings, the transportation speed is now used correctly when calculating the drive times in Center of Gravity. On page Center of Gravity, in the Demand/Supply Distribution map, the Center of Gravity locations were not visible when loading a CoG results dataset, although the location latitude and longitude data were visible on the CoG Run Details page. When downloading the model output, the 'Force Close' attribute would not be exported to the Supplier sheet. Transport lanes were not appearing on the reference map when comparing results datasets that contained different products. Opening and Closing Costs were not applied in single-period models. This behavior has been adjusted such that these costs will always be applied when Initial Status Closed is set to 1. It was possible that Whiteboard Results would disappear from the list where they can be loaded, this version fixes that problem for the future. However, this does not fix Whiteboard Results that have already disappeared. If that happened to you, please contact us so we can fix this manually for you.

Dear Community,We are excited to share the upcoming enhancements to the AIMMS WebUI, aimed at enriching its features and capabilities.Introducing the New Diagram Widget TypeOur newest addition, the Diagram widget type, offers a dynamic and versatile solution for visualizing project diagrams. Whether it's network flows, pipelines, or layouts, this widget provides enhanced features and flexibility comparable to the Network Object widget in the AIMMS WinUI. With an interactive canvas supporting the addition of nodes and arcs, and the ability to be driven by model data, the possibilities are endless.Similar to the Map widget, the Diagram widget allows configuration with multiple Node sets, each representing a collection of nodes plotted on the canvas. Additionally, the Arc Set enables the representation of arcs between nodes on the canvas.Currently, the Diagram widget supports five node templates for the representation of nodes.Please note that this widget is currently being released as an experimental feature. We are keen on gathering feedback and have plans for further expansion and enhancement in the futureStay tuned for the documentation of this widget type for more details!Check out an example of the Diagram widget type used to build the WhiteBoard feature in the AIMMS SC-Navigator application. Introducing Two New WebUI Library Functions webui::RequestFileUpload and webui::RequestFileDownloadIn response to feedback received on the Upload and Download widgets, we have enhanced the upload process to be a one-click action and expanded the capabilities to enable uploads and downloads to be triggered from various components such as buttons, item- actions, page- actions, etc.These new functions allow you to initiate file upload and download directly from AIMMS procedures, enabling integration with buttons or other actions.Stay tuned for the documentation of this feature for more details!We understand your excitement about these features. We will keep you all informed as the AIMMS 24.3 release is made. We hope these features enhance your applications and contribute to an even better user experience. Your feedback and suggestions are highly valued, so please share them in the comments. Thanks,Team WebUI.

Starting with AIMMS version 24.1 you can now run Python, R and other services on the AIMMS Cloud Platform.What?You can bring your own Python or R script and extend your AIMMS model to run it. We will run the service for you, provisioning the required Azure resources. Running a Python or R image in a separate Docker container.  Currently one Python and one R image, but we will extend the collection as the demand grows. AIMMS Cloud Platform only.Why?We wanted to make it super easy for you to extend your AIMMS model with Python scripts or R scripts, so that you can ‘outsouce’ calculations where these scripting languages and their libraries would add value.And we believe we are making this easier by saving you the trouble of having to arrange deployment of a Python or R image. Pricing?Until the end of June 2024 we will provision this service as ‘free-of-extra-charge’.Once we learn more from you about your use cases, we will set the pricing for 1 July 2024 onwards. You can earn discounts by giving us your feedback!  Documentation?Reference documentationDevelop a Python service and integrate it into AIMMS  

SC Navigator 24.3.1Date February 26, 2024 New Features The Whiteboard feature has been added: a powerful tool designed to streamline supply chain modeling. This innovative feature allows you to create a diagram of your supply chain network and translate it into an Excel template. The Whiteboard enhances the speed and accuracy of supply chain modeling, while also serving as an introduction to the SC Navigator approach of capturing the behavior and configuration of real-world supply chains in a spreadsheet. More information can be found in the Whiteboard documentation. Improvements The Inventory Cover functionality has been improved by introducing "Maximum Inventory Cover". The attribute "Inventory Cover" has been renamed to "Minimum Inventory Cover". With these attributes you can set the minimum / maximum number of next periods' outflow covered in inventory. On page Results - Transportation, the Transport Results table is added, showing all transport lanes including their capacities. The node colors on the main map have been updated to improve visibility and to better distinguish between different nodes and resource groups. The old colors are still available via the widget action Customize Nodes on the main map. Bug Fixes The Enforce Base Case Constraints option was not handled correctly when applying this via the scenario functionality. As a side effect, checking or unchecking that option will be faster. The Trade-Off Analysis did not work correctly. The model would sometimes report the solution incorrectly as infeasible. The changes made in version 24.2.1 with respect to group count constraints could result in very slow performance in instances with a high number of suppliers, productions and/or warehouses. This new version resolves those slowdowns. The "Risk" attribute for custom objectives was not populated correctly when generating templates. Values were written to the column of attribute "Refundable with Limit". SC Navigator would report models with inventory and {warehouse group} capacity constraint incorrectly as infeasible. This was due to a constraint being enforced for group values, but for one variable (outflow) the flow was calculated but for the other variable (inventory) it was not. The template was not generated correctly when custom objectives had a "-" in their name. When a custom objective was renamed, its previous name was still taken into account. When capacities were only defined at the product level, the tooltips of the charts on the result pages did not show them. On page Trade-Off Analysis, the Run button could be pressed multiple times, triggering more runs than needed. On page Center of Gravity, if the option Move to Closest City was selected, the tooltip and the result tables used different names for locations. When there was a Trade-Off Analysis run in progress and a new Trade-Off Analysis run started with a newly loaded dataset, the previously started runs and the new runs were conflicted. The Data Validation was numerically more strict than the network constraints. On the Circular Flow page and the Load Optimization Results dialog, some internal names were visible. These are now properly translated to understandable names. Forced Flow data validation with active inventory was not working correctly with groups.

We are hearing from a growing number of customer and prospects that they:are using Snowflake as their central data repository would like to upload/download data from there to/from their AIMMS applications.Using our Data Exchange Library app developers could already build that exchange themselves. Still, to save them time we developed an AIMMS library to make that even less work: https://documentation.aimms.com/snowflake/index.html.We hope you will find this useful, saving you time to work on other things. Please share your experiences with us via support@aimms.com.

If you are subscribed to the Product Updates on this community, you might have received an email notification on February 2nd in which the link to the product update did not work. With today's release, the links should work properly again.  SC Navigator 24.2.1Date February 15, 2024 New Features The name of the uploaded Excel file will now be stored together with the dataset. It is shown in dataset overviews. This allows you to see what the source of the data is. The model has been extended with two attributes "Minimum Capacity" and "Maximum Capacity" on the "Production Routing" sheet. That allows you to specify the capacity for a Bill of Material. (This value is in the same capacity unit as the data on sheet "Production".) A new sheet has been added: Bill of Material Groups. This allows you to create groups of Bill of Materials, in the same way that you create Product and Supplier groups. You can use {BOM} groups for the above-mentioned Minimum Capacity and Maximum Capacity. These capacities are also shown in the Results - Production page, as well as in the Excel and Database/Parquet results. The Minimum and Maximum # of Open Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses attributes have been added to the Supplier, Production, and Warehouse sheets in the template. These allow count constraints to be added for curly bracket location, supplier, production and warehouse groups. More information on count constraints can be found in the documentation: Count and Ratio Constraints. Improvements On page Results - Warehouse, when comparing scenarios, the "Throughput, Inventory" chart groups results by dataset. After feedback from various users, we have adjusted the behavior of the model when using a Bill of Material that is specified over multiple production facilities in the "Production Routing" sheet. In previous versions, such a bill of material was required to use all facilities. The current model can pick one or more, depending on how much production capacity is needed. If desired, the old behavior can be achieved, by creating multiple Bill of Materials together with intermediate products. On page Results - KPI Overview, and on the KPI Summary page, costs for Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses have been split into three buckets - Fixed Cost, Variable Cost, and Open/Close Cost. On the KPI Summary page, the Service Widget now also contains the Cost Per UOM and the (number of) Open Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses. The capacity on the server that is used to do all the optimization requests is shared by all users that use the same cloud. Previously, all optimization requests from all users were handled with the same priority. This means that a normal optimization request that was started by one user, had the same priority as Trade-Off Analysis or Risk Analysis requests that were started by another user. So, if you started a normal request after someone else started an Analysis request, it could take a long time before your request would be processed. Now, normal optimization runs have priority over runs from Trade-Off Analysis or Risk Analysis. On page Center of Gravity, the transportation speed can be changed now. The default value is the average speed of all transportation types in the dataset. In the dialog Add CoGs to the set of Warehouses, the values for Warehouse Group for CoGs and Location Group for CoGs are now initialized with the CoG Location Group/CoG Warehouse Group value provided in the template. We have removed the "Solution found" dialog message at the end of a Solve Max Drive Time run, to prevent an unnecessary click. By default, Suppliers are no longer included in the CoG calculations as many users ran into the warning Warning infinite capacity treated as zero. If you want to include suppliers, please select them again on page CoG Settings. You can now edit the Center of Gravity Wiggle Factor parameter. The initial value is set to the average of the Transportation Wiggle factor in input data. The tooltip for the CoG Weight Factor now includes a brief explanation of what this parameter controls. When exporting CoG locations, the CoG Primary/Secondary Transport Cost values will be used to populate the 'Cost Per Distance' for primary or secondary lanes connecting the exported CoG locations. This ensures consistency between the parameters used in the Center of Gravity analysis and the exported data to be used in subsequent network optimization workflows. SC Navigator could report models with inventory and {warehouse group} capacity constraints incorrectly as infeasible. Bug Fixes In some cases, saving the results datasets could be much slower in SC Navigator version 24.1.1, compared to the previous version. The Weighted Average Lead Time on the KPI Summary dialog was using the Maximum lead time, instead of the actual lead time. On page Results, the coloring in the Reference Result map was not correct. It used the same coloring as the Active Result map, while it should color based on the data of the Reference Result dataset. The calculation of Rate Card cost was not correct when lanes were defined with curly brackets. In that case, some costs were duplicated. The data validation executed after Add CoGs to the set of Warehouses could give incorrect data validation errors and warnings. The Trade-Off Analysis did not work correctly when having more than 10 runs and some of the runs would be marked as infeasible incorrectly. The model could incorrectly generate this warning when loading a dataset: There exists a warehouse that has 'Inventory Cover', but no 'Available (Inventory)' for next period.

SC Navigator 24.1.1Date January 11, 2024 New Features Risk Analysis simulates closing each location, one at a time, and assesses the corresponding impact. This will help you in finding the vulnerabilities of your supply chain. More information about the Risk Analysis can be found in the documentation: Risk Analysis. With Trade-Off Analysis you can do multiple solves, each with a different setup, and find the best trade-off between your KPIs. More information about the Trade-Off Analysis can be found in the documentation: Trade-Off Analysis. Improvements Previously, some pages displayed raw coding names instead of proper text. These have now been replaced with appropriate texts across all pages. The pages "Geocodes" and "Distance" are now also available when the data is loaded from a dataset. In that case, the data on these pages is read-only. The icons for the primary page actions on page "Geocodes" and "Distance", have been replaced by icons that match the action, instead of the generic AIMMS logo. Links to the latest e-learning material have been added to the template. Solving time for datasets with Single Sourcing data is decreased in case of both active and relaxed optimization options. The SC Navigator version numbering has changed. From now on, the first number will refer to the year in which the version was released. The second number still increases with every feature release. The third number increases for bug fix releases. Bug Fixes The data validation warning that appeared when a minimum number of Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses/Locations was provided without a maximum, is removed. When a results scenario was saved right after a Full Solution Export, the scenario did not appear in the list of results scenarios.

We re-implemented the REST service for Tasks that was described here. It has been released to our cloud platform (it is only available on our cloud platform). It is a much robust implementation that has consistent launch times and can reliably handle large request volumes. Currently we support both the old (V1) implementation and the new one (V2). The old version will not be available after 31 January 2024. More information here.You can also contact User Support if you have questions about this service or about switching to the new version.

Dear Community, We're excited to highlight the recent WebUI improvements introduced in the latest AIMMS 4.98.1 version, released in December 2023. Here's a quick overview: Unit Parameter Support for WebUI The WebUI now effectively supports identifiers with multi-dimensional UnitParameters as units, and they are displayed accurately. In previous versions, while data values were shown according to the unit, the unit itself was not displayed. Check the documentation for more details. Case-insensitive Ordering in WebUI Tables We've adjusted the default alphabetical sort order in the WebUI (Table widget) from case-sensitive to case-insensitive, aligning it with the WinUI pivot table behavior. To customize this, you can set the ‘webui.case-sensitive-comparison’ option to 1 in the ‘webui-options.conf’ settings file. We hope these features enhance your applications and contribute to an even better user experience.Your feedback and suggestions are highly valued, so please share them in the comments. Thanks,Team WebUI.

SC Navigator 4.05.01Date November 30, 2023 New Features From this version on, data can be stored in Parquet files in Azure Data Lake Storage. Using Parquet files allows for easier integration with other systems in your organization. Furthermore, reading and writing datasets can be faster, especially for larger datasets. We will contact you to plan when we will setup Data Lake Storage and convert your existing database to Parquet files. Improvements Data validation has been added for the case when the Maximum # of Source Locations data for customers is provided on the Product Location sheet. Please make sure to provide the Maximum # of Source Locations data for customers on the Customer Product Data sheet instead. The generated summary for scenarios has been improved to provide a clearer representation of the contents within each scenario. On page Results - Transport, the Rate Card Band results are now visible. On page Results - End To End, filters now operate independently from the filters on other pages, providing increased flexibility to alter the view. Additionally, a filtered icon indicator has been added for enhanced visibility. Bug Fixes In the Batch Run functionality, an error could occur when the solution was being saved to the database and the auto-generated scenario name was excessively long. As a result, the batch run process came to a halt because the long name could not be stored in the database. Now the app is able to automatically truncate the name into a shorter text, and include the original name as description. When comparing Results datasets, the KPI Summary dialog now shows the Results datasets in the columns instead of the rows in a table. On page Control Panel, the Model Control table now displays the section separation lines well when comparing multiple (newly saved) Results datasets. On page Data - Transport, in the Transportation Data table the Force Open and Force Close columns are now always visible. On page Results - Customer, the unserved demand is excluded from the lead time violation and the drive time distribution. In this case the drive time is not shown (zero). On page Results - Customer, if the demand is transported to a customer with zero distance, the drive time was incorrectly -inf. Now in this case the drive time is not shown (meaning: it is zero). When using side panel filters, the count of the Select/Deselect buttons were inaccurate and the clicking on the Deselect button would give an error message. On page Results, the tooltip for nodes on the map now shows the location description if the Use Description Location attribute is set. On page Data - Manage Data, when deleting one or more items, the text in the confirmation dialog is more accurate. On page Results - Production, clicking on a production in the bottom left chart, did not update the other charts based on this selection.

SC Navigator 4.04.01Date October 23, 2023 New Features The Center of Gravity App has been integrated into the SC Navigator App. This brings a streamlined process enabling analyzing Centers of Gravity within the same dataset and application. When there is a circular flow in the solution, a new page "Circular Flows" will show up. This page will help you finding the cause of the circular flow, such that it can be fixed in the input data. Improvements On page Scenario - Control Panel, more attributes can be handled. On page Results, colors of the node types have been changed to colors used in Network Design, and their icons also have changed for easier identification. On page Results, the View options side panel now shows the colored icons in the Filter By Node Type widget. This allows you to quickly identify the node type of nodes on the Results map. On page Data - Manage Data, the Scenarios table now includes an auto-generated scenario summary. This summary provides quick insights into each scenario without additional loading actions. The Save Scenario Dialog and the Load Scenario Dialog show this summary as well. Please note that the summary is only available for new scenarios. Data validation has been added in case the Average Load Size data is missing for a row with Cost Per Distance / Cost Per Trip / Minimum Cost Per Trip. Bug Fixes The list of Result Datasets that are generated during a batch solve, was not displayed correctly. The changes made in version 4.03.04 with respect to the E2E volumes could result in very slow performance in some instances. This new version will be faster than before, although it will be slower than before 4.03.04. The following data validation messages will no longer occur when the Available data is missing for a row with a curly bracket group in it: "WARNING: There are one or more attributes defined for (<combination including a curly bracket group>). However, this <warehouse/supplier> is not available for this product. You can make it available by specifying the 'Available' attribute on sheet '<Warehouse/Supplier (Product)>'." The data validation for Base Case Volumes now shows an error when Base Case Volumes on a last mile lane are different from the sum of demands at the customer location where the lane goes to. On page Results - Transport, the charts incorrectly displayed a duplicate transportation volume due to the inclusion of both product groups and individual products in the calculation of transportation data. On page Data - Transport, the Custom Objective input data for transport step was not visible when the data was not (yet) saved to the database. On page Scenario - Transport, the Relative Change value was not being applied properly. On page Scenario - Production, the adjustment data related to the Bill of Resource data was not being saved correctly. On page Data - Warehouse, in the Inventory (Product) Data tables the Force Open and Force Close columns are now always visible. On dialog page Custom Objective settings, the 'Include in model objective' variable can now only have binary values.