What’s New in AIMMS products? Check out the Greatest Hits in 2021

Curious about the features and product updates our team released in 2021? We collected the highlights below. 

AIMMS Development  

AIMMS Community Edition

Since its launch in March 2021, many users around the world are using AIMMS Community Edition! In case you haven’t requested yours yet, this free AIMMS license gives you access to our extensive capabilities for model diagnostics, data connectivity, web application building and visualization, case management features, and more. AIMMS Community Edition also includes access to the open source solvers CBC (for linear and mixed-integer problems), and IPOPT (for nonlinear problems), as well as the AOA solver (for mixed-integer nonlinear problems). It’s ideal for personal projects and training purposes. 

WebUI 

• We released a new Application Management capability as experimental feature in February and released this as a standard feature in September. This allows you to more easily copy, move and rename widgets on your pages.  Read more  

• The Grid Layout became a standard feature in July. This gives you far better control over where widgets are placed on your pages, dialogs, and side panels using pre-defined or custom layout templates. Read more 

• You can now download widget contents as an image - one of the many ideas submitted in our community.  

• You can now add custom tooltips for the X-, Y- and Size labels in your Bubble Chart widgets, which can further increase the clarity of the data that you are presenting to your users in this widget type. We also added support for custom tooltips to the Button, Upload and  Download widgets – another idea submitted in our community. 

• We announced a new WebUI Widget Framework, which will make widgets more flexible, robust, and easy to use for us and our users to manage, and hosted a live product update to provide a demo of upcoming features.  

• We extended the Text Widget to support a string parameter as its content. This means that you can now dynamically specify the content of this widget. 

• PLUS we would love your feedback on the new widget types we are building. Take a short survey. 

Algorithmic Capabilities 

As of this summer, Gurobi can now be used on applications running on the AIMMS Cloud Platform - thanks to Gurobi’s new Web License Service (WLS). This expanded the choice of solvers you have across AIMMS products. 

In AIMMS 4.83 (released in November), we added support for Gurobi 9.5, which comes with performance improvements for LP, MIP, MIQP models and for convex and non-convex MIQCP models. This release also shipped with the following:

• For most GMP procedures used to modify columns, rows or coefficients, we added a ‘raw’ variant which uses a set of columns and/or row numbers as input.
• You can now use a new procedure GMP::SolverSession::GetIIS to retrieve an irreducible infeasible set (IIS) for an infeasible math program. It returns the row and column numbers of the rows and columns in the IIS. The IIS will be calculated by the solver and is supported by CPLEX, Gurobi and BARON.

Besides this, we released other algorithmic capabilities this year, such as: 

• The use of quadratic structures in solvers, including Knitro 12.3 (or higher) 

• Support for blockmatrices in submodels 

Data Exchange Library 

The Data Exchange library now enables you to expose procedures in your model through a REST API. We also announced several improvements in the Data Exchange library last month, including: 

• A new annotation-based JSONDocument generator that creates a mapping for a standardized nested JSON document to read and write all data for a given collection of identifiers in a model. 

• A new function dex::ResetMappingData() to empty all identifiers, sets, and reset counters used in a particular mapping. 

AIMMS Network Design 

• We started the year by revamping the user experience in AIMMS Network Design, check out this post for details. 

• You can now generate Geocodes, Trip Times and Distances automatically. 

• We released features to make maps in AIMMS Network Design more customizable, easier to use, and visually appealing. 

• The app now enables you to model non-financial objectives, like carbon emissions and power consumption, to assess sustainability trade-offs. Watch a demo and learn more 

AIMMS Docs: Now open source 

We opened our documentation’s source code in an effort to make it easier for users to provide feedback and contribute to the improvement of our products. Read more 

AIMMS Academy: More training possibilities

This year, we expanded the course offering on AIMMS Academy to include:

• Error Handling
• WebUI Advanced User Interaction 
• Inventory Planning
• Execution Efficiency