In this post, I like to highlight the main developments that we will be focusing on in 2022. This roadmap has been created based on various inputs, including many customer & partner discussions, stakeholder interviews we did in 2021, incoming requests, and market trends so we can provide an even greater impact and more benefits to you and your users. In addition, these inputs have allowed us to adjust and finetune our product vision.
An important component of our vision is that we want to provide you AIMMS as a complete service in the Cloud where customers can find ready to go Supply Chain applications, run their end-to-end optimization practices using bespoke applications, and partners are able to build a thriving business. This means, we have adopted a Cloud-first strategy with a strong focus on deployment of applications and optimization engines (API-based), and the integration of external services (be it data, machine learning or AI). We want to allow more connected and integrated decision making such that more impact can be achieved by a growing community of users, easily. In our Cloud-first strategy, we are also moving from AWS to Azure to benefit from the partnership Microsoft can offer to us and to many of our customers.
In the Roadmap 2022 table below you can see that some of these items are not exactly specified yet as they also depend on our customer use cases and feedback during development. For example, in the AI/ML incorporation, as well as the understanding of optimization results, we are looking forward to your input. So please do reach out to us if you have specific use cases you are looking to address, or respond to requests and use the ideation on this community. Timing of all initiatives is purely indicative; we’ll update this table as frequently as possible.
It’s good to know that next to those main developments, lots of smaller improvements are developed and released on a regular basis. In addition, we are continuously improving our architecture to assure maintainable, and robustness of use. As always, you can expect from us to stay up to date with the latest solvers. Please be sure to regularly check the release notes of our various products you use.
Table updated July 4, 2022
| Focus Area | Details | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |
| Next Gen | Our next generation supply chain application consolidating our existing apps and delivering; improved UX for working with scenarios, more optimization options, improved inventory modeling, and improved data modeling. |
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| Beta |
| Data Exchange Library | Multi-functional library to generate both REST API servers and clients and easily map data onto AIMMS models, designed to minimize the programming effort for app developers (OAuth, OpenAPI, …) | Parquet-file support | OAuth support | OpenAPI support | Incremental releases |
| PRO REST services | Providing programmatic access to our cloud deployment platform for publishing apps, running apps, managing users/groups/permissions, etcetera. | Users, Apps | Sessions | ||
| Incorporating AI/ML into models | Making it easy to incorporate AI/ML functionality into AIMMS-cloud-powered analytics/optimization flows (Azure ML, Bring-Your-Own-Scripts, connect to your ML platform, …, TBD). | DIY via DEX | BIY via Azure ML | DBA (Done by AIMMS) Beta | |
| UI-builder: improved tabular data manipulation | Step-improvement in tabular data manipulation (removing one hurdle from switching from WinUI to WebUI) More details here. | Scope clear | Beta released | V1 | V2 |
| UI-builder: widget upgrades + DIY widgets | New visualization widgets + easier widget customization or even creation of custom widgets by app developers More details here. | New Combination Chart | Theming, | Incremental releases | Incremental releases |
| UI-builder: flow widget | Providing app developers with a flexible tool for creating data-driven diagrams (removing one hurdle from switching from WinUI to WebUI) | V1? | |||
| Optimization results easier to understand | Exploring how to improve the experience of understanding solutions and handling infeasibilities to better serve app developers and end users | ongoing | ongoing | ongoing | Ongoing |
| Azure Cloud | Switching from AWS to Azure as Cloud Service Provider for AIMMS Cloud Platform, including ‘transactable’ in Azure Marketplace |
| new customers + migrating | target completion |
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