Product Updates

I like to inform you that a pre-release of the end user table filtering is now available for you to try. Earlier, this new feature has been discussed in https://community.aimms.com/product-updates-roadmap-36/filtering-in-tables-567. It will allow end users to more easily drill down into the data in front of them and focus on what they like to see. This first version will offer an initial set of possibilities and based on feedback and ideas we have to improve, the feature will be enriched. What you can do, after activating “Data Filter” in the experimental feature panel, add Filter Rules to both the columns and rows of a table.    There is a large set of predefined rules on board and depending on whether you have a string/element value, or a numerical value, you need to select e.g. ‘great than’ or ‘contains’. We also offer a ‘show top- or bottom-n’ (numeric only).  In the final release, a developer does not have to do anything to offer this to your end users. It will work ‘out-of-the-box’ and automatically become available in each table.    The pre-release, the release conditions, and current (draft) documentation can be found here (up to August 15). Of course, you need to have an actively maintained license to try it out.   Please add your feedback as a reply to this post. Happy filtering!

We’ve added a new page in documentation that outlines deprecated features and functionality.   It provides a timeline for the planned “end of life” of all deprecated features, so you can prepare your projects and plan upgrades.   Check it out now: https://documentation.aimms.com/deprecation-table.html

Today (23 June 2020) we released the AIMMS 4.74.1 Feature Release, including: Scaling linear models in the Math Program Inspector ODH-CPLEX Solver Updated to Version 5.0 WebUI Item Actions Improved Bubble Chart Widget Missing Values and Areas in Line Charts Sorting Dates in a Table Online Function Reference Used in Help For details on the features released, read new features.For details on all changes and fixes this release includes, please refer to the release notes.   

Product Update - June 2020: AIMMS 4.74, WebUI Improvements, SC Navigator Apps, Python, and Deprecated Functionalities   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, @Gertjan de Lange. I hope this email finds you well. We have a lot of exciting announcements this time, so this Update will be longer than usual. Let's take a look.   New AIMMS Release AIMMS 4.74 was released today. This feature-packed release offers new benefits for you. We have upgraded the ODH-CPLEX Add-on (version 5). This can be hugely beneficial for complex scheduling models, or models that decompose well. If you want to try it out, let us know!   A new Scaling Tool in the Math Program Inspector prevents numerical instability and/or performance issues due to poor scaling. This is a unique tool in the market and can be tremendously helpful to improve your models with limited effort. Our Function Reference is now accessible directly from the modeling IDE.   Many of the WebUI improvements we shared in earlier Product Updates are included in this release. These range from Item Actions for chart widgets to date sorting in tables and improved Bubble Chart sizing.   WebUI Developments  Speaking of WebUI improvements, we are also working on: Page Layout V2: We are making good progress on the improved layout of your pages and started our initial test with our own SC Navigator Apps. The feedback and results so far are encouraging. As you can see in the screenshot below, we have made a better use of real estate and improved resizing.      Filter for table data: Soon, end users will be able to filter table data. This is especially handy for tables with large data sets, where scrolling is not ideal. Date Time Picker: We still have some work to do on the Date Time Picker. We hope to release it this summer and provide you with best practices on how to leverage this in applications that are used in multiple time zones.  Improvements in SC Navigator Apps Demand Forecasting It’s been 3 months since the first release of Demand Forecasting Navigator and we have gathered lots of feedback from customers. We have focused on the following UI improvements:  A more intuitive workflow  Easy and quick navigation to move from one forecast record to another, and a zoom functionality to work at different levels in the forecast pyramid  Quickly understand where you are in the process and review open tasks Summary views to see totals by product, customer, and location groupings  The ability to add additional reference lines to the forecast chart; previous, top down, and bottom up forecasts.  We have also worked on:  An option to adjust the amount of history used to generate the statistical model  An option to add a damping factor to any models that include a trend  A refinement to the learning algorithm to more heavily weight the impact of recent history   We’re excited about this major update to the app and expect it to be released around the end of this month. Inventory Planning Our Inventory Planning App is coming soon. It will allow users to answer the following three questions:  For network design, what’s the inventory consequence of my network design?  For S&OP, what inventory targets should I use to support my desired service levels?  For inventory planners, what’s the health of my current inventory position?  Stay tuned! We will provide more details in the next Product Update. Python Integration    Based on our experience with the R-link, trends in building computational landscapes and discussions with customers, we have made a strategic turn in our Python Integration project: We will make it more generic, supporting multiple scripting languages  We will not provide facilities for running scripts, those are widely available and needs vary greatly among customers As a result, we will develop:  An AIMMS library to interact with external (computational) services that support REST API calls   An AIMMS library for format conversions (e.g. JSON to AIMMS identifiers) Our new Supporting Scripting Services will give our customers ultimate flexibility in using the service of their choice (now and in the future). It will also allow them to leverage and customize their own scripting deployment environments and/or make use of specialized third party deployment services (such as Azure Functions or AWS Lambda). Reach out if you would like to learn more. Deprecated Functionality    AIMMS PRO Cluster We have deprecated the AIMMS PRO Cluster as it was too complex to maintain. For most customers, the AIMMS Cloud Platform provides the scaling and business continuity features that the AIMMS PRO Cluster was intended to provide. We will soon publish documentation to assist you with this change. If you are considering using the AIMMS PRO Cluster, please contact us so we can work with you to find the best approach.Tableau TDE Provider We have deprecated the Tableau Datalink Provider. Our focus has moved to making good, general data interfaces possible, so our customers can use of those to connect with any tools available. Customers using the Tableau Datalink Provider can convert the data to a regular data txt representation (instead of creating TDE-files) and enable any update needs within the Tableau product itself.  Please let me know if this update was useful in the comments below.   Gertjan de Lange Product Owner 

View the recording of the recent AIMMS Webinar: ETL-based Integrations as a Service (May 2020)     In this interactive webinar, we provided information about our new managed service for integrating different ERP systems and other data sources with AIMMS applications. We introduced the service proposition and explained how it's different from more traditional approaches. The webinar contains a demonstration of an end-to-end integration powered by the innovative SnapLogic integration platform. The presentation was carried out in collaboration with our partner Lucas Laumans at Rojo Consultancy.   (Further discussion and questions on this topic welcome in the comments!)

Product Update - May 2020: New WebUI features, improved math program scalability and deprecations   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, @Gertjan de Lange. I hope this email finds you well. I'm very excited to share the developments below with you.  WebUI Improvements AIMMS 4.73 was a loaded release, with many improvements for the Map Widget. We have many more interesting developments on the way:  We are adding the ability to have line breaks and area coloring in line charts. We just finished extending Right Click actions to the Table, Scalar, Bar, Line and Gantt-chart. Other charts (Pie, Tree, Bubble) will follow. We improved Bubble sizes on the Bubble chart.  We are making nice progress on the Table Filter, allowing your end users to "drill into" table data.   Scaling Math Programs  We are working on a scaling tool for LP/MIPs in the Math Program Inspector. This will allow you to improve models that have stability or performance issues due to poor scaling. AIMMS will provide you with suggestions to change your model in order to improve its behavior. So far, this is a manual task for AIMMS model developers. This new tool will take a lot of work out of their hands. If all goes well, we are looking to release this towards the end of the quarter.   Deprecated Functionality    WebUI wizard  With the new Workflow panel introduced, we have deprecated the WebUI wizard. Please check out the Workflow panel (if you haven't already). It's used extensively and considered very valuable. We will inform you of the complete removal of the wizard in due time.    Excel Add-in  As of now, we will consider the Excel Add-in deprecated functionality. This means we won’t further support it or fix any issues. In time, it will be removed completely and no longer function. There is no direct replacement for this functionality as our focus has moved to deploying Apps on the AIMMS Cloud or on AIMMS PRO on premise, where either a WebUI or PRO-API call is used to interact with models. All data exchanges with xls-files goes via the available functions of AXLL Library which is independent of the need to install Excel locally or server side. If you have concerns about this, please contact us.  Map V1 and Page Actions V1 Map V1 and Page Actions V1 were deprecated in 2019. Please note that both of these will be fully removed. It's important to upgrade to Map V2 and/or Page Actions V2 in AIMMS 4.73 if you haven't yet.  Please let me know if this update was useful in the comments below. Gertjan de Lange Product Owner 

On April 29, we released AIMMS 4.73, a release with a number of exciting new features for the Map widget in the WebUI. For all the details, please refer to the release notes and the new features section of our website. Regards,Mischa

Product Update - April 2020: AIMMS 4.73 coming soon, new features in S&OP Navigator   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, @Gertjan de Lange.   I hope this email finds you in good health. We have some exciting releases lined up. AIMMS 4.73 coming soon with new features, including Map extensions As I mentioned in last month's update, we are working on some exciting Map widget extensions and are close to releasing these in AIMMS 4.73. Soon, you will be able to add a heat map, color and store focus arcs, icons to nodes, create tooltips, and more! For details, check out this post. Item Actions on the Map widget We are adding Item Actions to widgets in a right-click context menu, starting with the Map widget and the Table widget soon after. This feature allows you to define a set of item actions based on the identifier name. It's similar to the Widget Actions feature. Item Actions allow you to target a specific part of the data with custom actions. Using this in combination with Store Focus gives you even more control. Other widgets will follow. Stay tuned!  Adding model annotation support for an UponChange procedure   Just as we enabled you to create model annotations for flags, tooltips and such, you will be able to specify an UponChange procedure that will run if an identifier changes a value in the WebUI. This allows you to use the same procedure for multiple identifiers, instead of creating one for each identifier.  Math Program Inspector, and support for Infeasible Solutions    In the upcoming 4.73 release, the Irreducible Inconsistent System (IIS) will be retrieved from the solver by default, if this action is selected in the Math Program Inspector. In previous versions, an algorithm implemented in AIMMS was used. This new feature offers several advantages, including speed. For models with integer variables, it also retrieves the IIS if the infeasibility is triggered by the integrality of some of the variables.   IBP support coming soon to S&OP Navigator   We are developing new functionality for S&OP Navigator to support Integrated Business Planning (IBP), as defined by Oliver Wight. So far, we have built features to support the new product introduction process. The ‘Product Management’ process allows the user to create projects for new products and manage each project through different stages, from idea to business case, development, test & value, and launch. The user can create new products and define expected demand and resource requirements, allowing for impact assessments in the supply review stage.   We are also significantly enhancing the scenario management capability in the app. Users will be able define multiple demand scenarios that can then be assessed and ultimately saved for review and comparison. For both demand and supply, this is achieved through the creation of vulnerabilities and opportunities that can then be applied, in any combination, to the base plan. This is illustrated in the process flow below.   What makes you want to use AIMMS?  We have received a number of responses already in our Online Community and would love to hear from you! Share your input here.  Please let me know if this update was useful in the comments below.  Gertjan de Lange Product Owner

You can now try out the Right Mouse Action menu for the Map Widget using the pre-release available in the link below. The folder also contains draft documentation, and an example (screen below). In the example Right Mouse action menus have been defined for both nodes and arcs. Similar to the Page or Widget Actions, you can define & control the procedure, display text, icon, and active state through the model.   The pre-release, the release conditions, and current documentation can be found here until April 21. Of course, you need to have an actively maintained license to try it out.   Please add your feedback - do include screen dumps as we love to see what you can build - as a reply to this post. Happy building!  

Today, March 19, 2020, we released the AIMMS 4.72 Feature Release. For details, see the release notes and/or the New Features page. With kind regards,Mischa  

Product Update - March 2020: AIMMS 4.72, Demand Forecasting App launched, Map Widget and more   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, @Gertjan de Lange.     While we are in turbulent times with the coronavirus impacting our lives in many different ways, we continue to support our customers and deliver on product improvements. Our team, across locations, is primarily working from home. Our development team is quickly adjusting to this new way of working and we hope that this will not impact productivity. We will keep you informed. AIMMS 4.72 to be released soon In a few days, we expect 4.72 to be released with some important updates. First, we have made the List Widget available as an Experimental Feature, as described in our community. The widget allows you to provide some great end user support. For example, for tasks. It also enables you to build custom legends.   We are also introducing an experimental ‘CurrentPage’ feature (for the WebUI) to detect the location of the end user, such that we can use this information to steer the workflow, show certain information, or do page-specific validations. Since this interaction can be complex, we will collect feedback before launching it as formal feature.   Furthermore, we will upgrade the CP Optimizer to the latest 12.10 version. This release can increase the performance of your Constraint Programming models significantly. We look forward to hearing about your experiences with it!   Demand Forecasting Navigator is now available   In case you missed it, last week, we announced the launch of Demand Forecasting Navigator. This new App in our supply chain planning suite automates tedious, manual tasks like sifting through data, so planners can focus on important trends and outliers. It uses machine learning algorithms to continuously fine tune your forecast.   Read more on our website What makes you want to use AIMMS?   We would love to hear from you! Please tell us why you like working with AIMMS by answering this question in our community. Your input is very valuable to us and others!  Map Widget extension  We are excited to share more information about our upcoming Map object extensions. Soon, you will be able to add heat maps, color and store focus arcs, icons to nodes, create tooltips, and more! For details, check out this post (make sure to create an account in our community if you don't have one). In addition, we will enable you to add your Google© API key to display a Google Map background in the Map Widget. Please be sure to check licensing conditions before doing so!  DateTime Picker and Localization update    We are still working hard on the DateTime picker and location features I announced in the fall last year. We are making some adjustments to ensure we can do this well. This work is happening in the AIMMS core. It requires a diligent approach and time to make sure future models and Apps work well. We hope to release this in the second half of Q2.  Please let me know if this update was useful in the comments below. Gertjan de Lange Product Owner 

We have been asked to add Filtering to widgets, and most importantly to the Table. Currently we are working on this and like to have your feedback. Instead of giving you a set of pictures, we created a clickable prototype for you to try and give feedback on.  How to use the clickable prototype? Just open the link below and click on the ‘blue’ boxes that appear when you click on the screen (that are the interactive parts as we did not make a fully functional setup). → In this prototype, you can go to Denver, and select “Add Filter Rule”, from there on, you can fill the first prepared rule and add a filter second rule. Once added, those can be removed again via the Denver column or the general widget filter icon.     https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/WRWF4X89T8X#/screens/409370224_Table-0100_Default We want to start with a number of filter concepts such as value based (min, max, between, top-n) and string based (contains, does not contain, equal to).  As you can imagine, this filter can also work for our chart widgets such as bar chart, tree map etc. Idea is to make the concept as general as possible. Please add your feedback below! Add a filter rule on the column “Denver”    The Filter Rule builder with in the background the Filtered Table 

Product Update - February 2020: AIMMS 4.71, New Demand Forecasting App, and WebUI improvements   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, @Gertjan de Lange. We have some exciting product developments to share. Before diving in, we wanted to remind you that we have a great event coming up on April 3 in Amsterdam: AIMMSFEST! We hope to see you there. AIMMS 4.71 is now available Late last month, we released AIMMS 4.71 with some great features (check out the list here). We also released 3 hotfixes since. The need for these hotfixes was not due to regression or stability issues. It's because we have improved the original release and want to get a better version out there as soon as we can. If you want to learn more, let me know.   New Demand Forecasting App   As we announced a couple of months ago, Demand Forecasting Navigator is coming soon to SC Navigator! The App automates tedious, manual tasks like sifting through data, so planners can focus on important trends and outliers. It uses machine learning algorithms to continuously fine tune your forecast.  Customers can use it alone, or in combination with AIMMS S&OP Navigator to create different demand scenarios and understand the impact on your supply plan. We will do a limited release to AIMMS SC Navigator customers this month and a public release in March. Stay tuned for more info!   AIMMS Cloud Uptime Are you ready to move to the AIMMS Cloud? We can have your account ready in 5 minutes, with as much capacity as you need and at no extra cost over your AIMMS PRO on premise subscription (assuming you need similar capacity). The report below shows our Cloud uptime for the last twelve months. These uptimes are including maintenance time for upgrades, which are almost always ‘live upgrades’ without (planned or unplanned) downtime.   In order to achieve high uptimes, all hardware components are redundant (at least two) and are automatically replaced upon failure. All software services will auto-restart in case they crash. We continuously monitor system availability and capacity utilization. Multiple back-up scenarios provide business continuity and ransomware protection. On the security side, our ISO 27001 certification covers our Cloud platform. Leave a comment below if you’re interested in learning more.  Developing custom and interactive lists in the WebUI    You might have heard about the new List Widget we are developing to enhance the end user experience and improve guidance in-App. The widget allows you to show a generated list of (grouped) items and connect those, if required, with actions. These items can, for example, represent a set of tasks or a custom legend, as shown in the screenshot above. Items are interactive. In this case, the checklist was opened to ask the user for input (via a Dialog Page).  Defining your Page Layout and Managing your overall App    As announced in December's Product Update, we are working on a new way of handling the Page Layout and Widget Management in web Apps. We will release this in two steps, as an Experimental Feature, in the coming months.  Version 1 will allow you to focus on recreating your Page Layout and providing a better experience for the developer and end user (see picture below). Version 2 will focus on App management, allowing you to manage pages and widgets in one overview and thus also move widgets between pages, copy widgets, filter the list of items or search for a specific item. We will announce a pre-release of version 1 on the Community as soon as possible, so you can have a taste. Please stay tuned.     Quick reminder: Internet Explorer, 32-bit no longer supported Please note that Internet Explorer 11 is no longer supported. A message will appear if you open your web Apps in this browser when running AIMMS 4.72 or higher. The AIMMS Developer IDE will no longer provide the option to open Internet Explorer, as of the most recent bugfix of 4.71 and 4.72.  We also no longer release 32-bit AIMMS installation files. Please upgrade your development platform to 64-bit to be able to enjoy the latest and greatest of AIMMS.    

You can now try out the List Widget (by activating the experimental feature) using the pre-release available in the link below. The folder also contains draft documentation, and an example (screen below). In the example a Task List and Legend is created and positioned on a page, or in the side panel. Some actions of the Task List are interactive.   The pre-release, the release conditions, and current documentation can be found here until March 15. Of course, you need to have an actively maintained license to try it out.   Please add your feedback - do include screen dumps as we love to see what you can build - as a reply to this post. Happy building!   PS: An earlier discussion on this topic can be found here: https://community.aimms.com/product-updates-roadmap-customers-only-36/new-list-widget-526  

Hi Community,   As part of keeping up with technology trends and improving experience we have been working on upgrading the Map/Network widget from OpenLayers to Leaflet framework. The underlying technology will change and you might notice some small visual differences, but you will not need to make any changes to the widget. The functionality and configuration will remain the same.   Some noticeable visual changes: Arcs will be drawn differently. Earlier we used a custom algorithm to draw the arcs. Now arcs drawn from right to left or bottom to top will be drawn with a downward curve, and left to right or top to bottom will be drawn with an upward curve. This makes it slightly more intuitive. The users will be able to determine the direction just by the way the arcs are drawn. We have improved the relative sizing algorithm for node sizes by relating the surface area of the nodes in each node set instead of relating radius of the nodes. This improves the visual representation of the node sizes as the area is twice as big if the node size value is twice as large. Map widget with OpenLayers (Current)   Map Widget with Leaflet and improvements   New Features that can be expected: Maximum Reference Value: We are introducing a new option for each node set such that node sizes are calculated based on a defined reference value. If no value is defined, the sizes are relatively sized based on the maximum value of the size identifier. This allows you to relatively size nodes from different node sets with the same reference as well. Nodes with size 0 or NULL will not be drawn anymore. Ability to add icons to nodes. The icons will be drawn inside the nodes. It makes it easy to represent different node sets like Factories or Depots etc, with icons. Ability to control the order of nodes sets to determine which node sets should be drawn on top of others in case there are overlapping nodes. Custom tooltips for nodes and arcs. Similar to other widgets, we will extend the ability to define custom tooltips for nodes and arcs to display information. Enabling annotations on arcs as well. You can apply annotations to arcs and change styling similar to nodes. The custom styling will apply to the arc as well as the label. You need not have different CSS for each element of the arc.  Store focus on arcs. You will be able to leverage store focus functionality on arcs just as you can on nodes. Improved performance. The map will be able to accommodate higher number of nodes and arcs. Heatmaps on the maps. Heatmaps can be used to show additional information to help users with trends or other intuitive data. HeatMap Example:   We value your feedback and would love to hear what you think of the above list.    Thanks, Pratap

Dear all,   Today we released another AIMMS (4.71.4), containing a number of fixed problems. For details, please refer to the release notes.   Regards, Mischa

Today, we released the AIMMS 4.71.3 Hotfix release. For details on what is fixed, please see the release notes.   Regards, Mischa

Today, we released AIMMS 4.71.2, a hotfix release. For details on the changes, please see the release notes.   Regards, Mischa

Dear community, I like to share that we are currently building a new widget that we have called a List Widget. The idea of this widget is that you can generate a list of (grouped) items to e.g. build up a set of Tasks, develop a custom Legend, or find other means (I am sure you can think of other ways to use this). The items and therefore the widget, can be totally generated from the model (similar to the Status Bar, Page Actions, etc.).  An illustration and specification can be found below. We look forward to hear your feedback.     Design Examples of List Widget   Specification: ! Specification of a list group (e.g. "Today", "This Week", "Legend", etc.)webUI::ListGroupSpecification === { 'title', 'tooltip' }! Specification of an itemwebUI::ListGroupItemsSpecification === { 'icon', 'color', 'text', 'tooltip', 'procedure', 'external', 'state', }! Each list group has a specificationMyListGroups(indexInteger,indexListSpecification) in string! Each list of items in a group has various specificationsMyListGroupItems(indexInteger, indexInteger, webui::indexListItems) in string    

Hi all!   Today, January 30, we released the AIMMS 4.71.1 release. For details on what is included, please have a look at the release notes here.   Regards, Mischa

Product Update - January 2020: New Drive Time Scenario, MPI update, AOA and WebUI changes   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, Gertjan de Lange. The new year brings new opportunities to improve our product for you. We are excited to share what's on our roadmap and will keep you informed in our Product Updates and Online Community. We also want to hear from you as much as possible! Help us improve AIMMS further, grow our community and reach the next level in decision support applications.  Tell us how we can improve our product We'd like to invite you to share your product improvement ideas in our Community, as often as you can. Please provide as much detail as possible to help us understand your need. It helps us a lot to receive ideas in the form of user stories: “as a user I want to be able to do XYZ, such that I can achieve Y.”  For example, instead of "Please add support for touchscreen," phrase your request as such: "As a production floor manager, my users need to be able to use my app on a touchscreen tablet so they can mark which machines are down while walking around." If you need help suggesting ideas as user stories, let me know. We will post some guidance in the Community as well. We look forward to hearing from you!      Share your ideas Improved Drive Time Scenario in Center of Gravity Navigator   We are pleased to announce that we have significantly improved the Drive Time Scenario in Center of Gravity Navigator, part of our Network Design Apps. With the improvements we are releasing, the model selects the minimum number of DCs that is necessary to reach all locations within the specified maximum drive time, and minimizes the total distance traveled. This results in fewer Centers of Gravity and greatly improved solution quality. The feature will be updated for our next release, so stay tuned!     Internet Explorer 11 no longer supported   As we announced in our Online Community, we have stopped supporting Internet Explorer 11, following Microsoft's announcement that it will end its support of Windows 7. We assume many of our Windows users are running on Windows 10 and/or use Edge or Chrome as their default browser. We recommend Chrome and will focus on both Chrome and Edge for further product developments.  Share your application screens You may recall that we're building a new Page Layout manager, as mentioned in our previous Product Update. We could really use some customer application examples to understand how your Apps can be mapped onto the new layout. The more we get, the better we can serve you. Please share some screenshots of your Apps with us, they will help us greatly! Share your screenshots Math Program Inspector updates As of AIMMS 4.71, the Math Program Inspector (MPI) will be using GMP functionality. Until recently, it used an interface that was created before GMP functionality existed. This change has several benefits:  The MPI code is easier for us to maintain, making it easier to add new functionality in the future. For example, we will work on an auto-scaling feature in the first half of 2020. The MPI can now be used to inspect stochastic programming models. That is, math programs generated with the function GMP::Instance::GenerateStochasticProgram.   Several minor bugs have been fixed.  The "new" MPI is slightly faster than the previous MPI.  Do you have the latest AOA version? Please note that we have released a new version of the AIMMS Outer Approximation Algorithm based on GMP functionality. The old version is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. You can read more about both versions on this page. WebUI Improvements we're working on We will release a number of new WebUI items in the coming months. We are creating a new Page Layout and tooling for Widget editing. We have worked on an initial version that will contain the core functionality to apply a new Layout mechanism to Pages (and enable safe conversion from old to new pages).   Furthermore, we are developing a series of stories of Map Widget extensions to improve usability for some of our customers. Think of tooltips, icon usage inside nodes, a heat map layer, the ability to open a right mouse menu, and more node size controls.  We are also working on the following: The ability to hide the Navigation menu   Perform inline Widget title edits (previously, a full replacement was needed)  Position a subtotal on top or at the bottom of a table (or combined)  Moving the Workflow Panel and Status Bar out of Experimental Features Please let me know if this update was useful in the comments below. Gertjan de Lange Product Owner 

This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, Gertjan de Lange.   Product Update - December 2019: Burst Capacity, Demand Forecasting capability, Page Layout and Widget changes, Ending Windows 7 Support Happy Holidays!On behalf of our team, I wish you a wonderful holiday season and all the best in 2020. This year, we reached many product development milestones, including a series of new workflow features for developers using our WebUI, improved performance, Burst Capacity and secure VPN access on the AIMMS Cloud, many developments in the AIMMS Library repository, and much more.    With the new year around the corner, we would love to hear how we can help you be more successful. Please take a moment to share your thoughts in our Customer Satisfaction Survey. The survey will take no more than 10 minutes to complete, and we are offering a free $25 Amazon.com gift card for the first 40 respondents who share their views.       Take the survey     AIMMS 4.70 is now available   Earlier this month, we released AIMMS 4.70. This release includes the Status Bar feature, announced in earlier Product Updates, which was also offered as a pre-release through the AIMMS community. Unfortunately, the DateTimePicker and TimeZone features are not included in this release. We did not want to hold the release any longer, as several customers were waiting for some improvements. We hope you enjoy AIMMS 4.70! For more details, please read the release notes.     New capabilities coming to SC Navigator   We are adding a new Demand Forecasting capability to AIMMS SC Navigator which is due to launch in Q1 2020. We also made some improvements in the maximum drive time algorithm used in Center of Gravity Navigator. These improvements will be released early next year as well. Contact us if you are interested in learning more.      Burst Capacity We have been working on offering Burst Capacity through the AIMMS Cloud. Some customers have been able to run thousands of scenarios with dozens of parallel sessions within days. Without the Cloud, this would normally take them weeks or months. With this capability, you can tap into significant server capacity over a short period of time (typically days or weeks), so that you can run a lot of scenarios without having to sign off for all of this capacity during the full subscription period. It's handy to run strategic yearly studies that require lots of processing power, for example. If you are an AIMMS PRO or AIMMS Cloud user and want to do the same, let us know and we can explore options that could work for you.       Adjusting Page Layouts and Widget Management  in AIMMS Apps   We are currently working on a new way of handling the Page Layout in our Web Apps. We now have a ‘packery’ service on board that re-arranges the widgets on a page when the browser is re-sized, but we have learned that the behavior is not ideal. So, we started working on a redesign. Our idea is for pages to receive a ‘Layout’ property from a set of predefined – and in time – customizable Layout Templates based on Grid CSS.  Besides improving the Layout, we want to make it easier to copy, paste, and duplicate widgets on pages or between pages, in order to improve maintenance and look and feel. The image above shows you an illustrative design of how this integration between Widgets and Page Layouts could take place. If you are interested in contributing to this discussion and providing feedback, please let me know.     We are ending support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 Microsoft announced it will no longer support both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 per January 14, 2020. Please take note that AIMMS will also no longer support or address any issues that happen to be reported on either OS.    I hope this Update has been useful. Please share your feedback in the comments below.    Gertjan de Lange Product Owner 

Product Update - November 2019: Important Deprecations, SC Navigator updates, Documentation Improvements and Survey   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, Gertjan de Lange. The year is almost coming to end. Let's cover some important news and feature releases you should be aware of as we head into 2020. By the way, if you have colleagues who would benefit from receiving upcoming Product Updates, ask them to sign up on this page!     Important: Deprecations coming up   As we announced in previous Product Updates and through product notifications, there are a number of deprecations coming up. Here's a reminder:  As of this month, the Map Widget V1 and Page Actions V1 in WebUI will be removed from our releases. Please make sure all your Apps are converted to the new Map Widget (available since AIMMS 4.61) and built using the new Page Actions identifier setup (available since AIMMS 4.68). Please use AIMMS versions 4.68 or 4.69 to do so.  Starting in January 2020, all AIMMS software releases will be 64-bit only. Per January, all AIMMS software releases will no longer support dongles. Contact us to request software nodelock licenses.     AIMMS SC Navigator  Since the introduction of AIMMS SC Navigator, we have been expanding the number of Apps as well as the functionality of the Apps themselves, based on our vision and customer feedback. Most recently, we enhanced AIMMS Network Design Navigator with the following features:   Executive review: The new scenario comparison functionality allows you to drill into more detail (transport costs, cost/unit) and compare scenarios side by side to evaluate differences and impact.     Demand simulation capability: Tackle demand uncertainty by simulating how changes in customer demand would impact your network’s capacity and costs. Assess how much additional demand your existing solution can accommodate and where it becomes infeasible.  Detailed cost breakdown by location: This new functionality provides you with insight into how various cost components (fixed cost, variable cost, supply cost, transportation cost) are influencing the cost to meet the demand for a given product at a given location.    Custom CSS via Annotation   We have seen many developers making use of annotations to adjust the look and feel of widgets in the WebUI, so we created documentation to elaborate on the changes we currently support and added some examples. We hope this gives you more guidance. Click here for details (see “Widgets and CSS properties supported for Annotation”).     Calendar and Time Zone Update In our September and October Product Updates, we mentioned that we were rolling out a DateTime picker in combination with Time Zone support. Unfortunately, we are facing some development challenges. Last week, we decided to halt the development of these features and re-group, as we were unhappy with the results. We are looking into possibly releasing the DateTime picker without the ability to set different application time zones, so Apps that do not run on multiple time zones can already benefit from it.   If you are running Apps in multiple time zones, please let us know so we can perform tests with your use case.   Help us improve our support resources by taking our survey! You know best what you need - please tell us in this brief survey! It should take about 5 minutes, and your input will help us greatly in deciding what to focus on as we improve and expand our product documentation, developer resources, and community content.   Tell us what you need   New Search in Documentation and How-To Speaking of improving support resources, we have added a search functionality in How-To and our Documentation. Check it out and don't miss the handy new Keyboard shortcuts list for developers.   Cloud Uptime Stats Did you know we've had 100% uptime in our AIMMS Cloud Platform for the last 6 months in a row?   I hope this Update has been useful. Please share your feedback in the comments below.  Gertjan de Lange Product Owner 

I like to inform you that I am making a pre-release available so you can try out the new upcoming Status Bar feature as e.g. discussed in https://community.aimms.com/aimms-webui-44/how-to-display-which-dataset-a-user-has-loaded-329 and in our previous Product Update https://community.aimms.com/product-updates-roadmap-customers-only-36/product-update-october-2019-413 The new Status Bar allows you to dynamically set the content in the sticky bar at the bottom (new UX only) that will be showing regardless of page switches. Ideal for items that need to be shown continuously. The items can also have a procedure call added to e.g. open a DialogPage to display details on the status item (see examples video in release folder). If you are running asynchronous solves, you can also update this items during a callback. Sure you find many other ways to use this.Of course, this feature and use cases will also be added to our AIMMS Design System (https://design-system.aimms.com/status-bar). The pre-release, the release conditions, and current documentation can be found here. Of course, you need to have an actively maintained license to try it out. Please add your feedback - do include screendumps as we love to see what you can build - as a reply to this post. Happy building!   

Product Update - October 2019: New Status Bar, AIMMS Design System, Python Update and more   This post is an archive of the Product Update email sent by AIMMS Product Owner, Gertjan de Lange. Before delving into the Product Update, I wanted to highlight some upcoming events. October is here and that means it's time for the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle. Many of us will be attending. I would love to meet if you're around. Send me an email and we can schedule a time or swing by Booth #3 to say hello. We are also organizing a Customer Event right after the INFORMS Annual Meeting. We will be touching on Customer Case Studies, our Supply Chain Vision and Product Roadmap, and Industry Trends. Sign up to attend! Status Bar     We started developing the Status Bar this sprint and expect to round it up in November. We completed designs and functionality, adding the option to call a procedure right from the Status Bar (for example, to open a Dialog with more details). You can see its specification below. WebUI::StatusBarItems === {'header', 'icon', 'color', 'text', 'tooltip', 'procedure', 'state'}  WebUI::StatusBarSpecification := {indexInteger, webui::indexStatusBarItems) To learn more about this feature, visit this discussion in our Online Community.   Calendar and TimeZone Update We are close to completing the DateTime picker this sprint and will be releasing this soon as an Experimental Feature. Stay tuned!      New Front-End Framework At AIMMS, we consider it important to update our architecture and tooling on a regular basis. This helps us build the best technology for our customers in the most effective way. Our Visual Studio update, see January 2019 update, is an example of the changes we're making. Last month, we brought the WebUI team together and after intensive research, testing, and several proofs of concept, we decided to move to React.  We will transition away from our current jQuery-based code base by intelligently replacing existing components, while rethinking part of the underlying architecture and building new components.   React will allow us to create even more complex and responsive elements without sacrificing maintenance. Moreover, the concepts behind React will be more suitable for adopting new engineering developments in the future. This is a major step in the lifecycle of our WebUI!      AIMMS Design System  I have highlighted the AIMMS Design System a few times in previous updates, to share what we would like to achieve with our UX changes. We realized that our customers really benefit from having access to this information, so after some feedback rounds, we made it publicly available. Read about our UX developments, our recently developed features and get tips and tricks to make your application work better.  Visit the AIMMS Design System     Python Integration We announced our plans to develop a Python integration in May and have been working hard to complete it. At this time, we are tuning the Developer side of the work (allowing AIMMS developers to easily use a Python script, including the ability to debug them). The next stage is deploying the AIMMS models that make use of Python onto our AIMMS PRO deployment platform (cloud and on-premise). Without the second, the value is limited to the Developer community. We want to ensure everybody using AIMMS can benefit from this. Let us know if you're interested, so we can provide you with pre-releases of the AIMMS-Python integration as soon as they become available. More updates to follow!     I hope this Update has been useful. Please share your feedback in the comments below.  Gertjan de Lange Product Owner