E-mail this pageExcel provides a powerful and easy to use modeling environment…
Excel is the best-selling spreadsheet in the world. It has very powerful and easy to use features - such as drag-and-drop, fill-handles, wizards and customized toolbars – by which one can quickly develop a model and a user interface in one go. It provides strong analytical tools, excellent graphical features and an open interface to external databases and program modules. Macros created with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) add extensive procedural capabilities, as well as flexibility to further enhance the user-interface of a model built in Excel.
… but model complexity and maintainability can become issues in Excel…
The counter side of Excel’s ease of use and flexibility is that the tool itself does not impose any structure and has no implicit separation of the data, business logic and interface layers. It is completely up to the model developer to assure consistency and integrity of the model, to separate input from output data and to warrant transparency. Adding or extending dimensions can be complicated since the data and model dimensions are directly linked to the cell structure. These aspects make Excel spreadsheets often very hard to maintain and to transfer. Excel is therefore most suited as a personal productivity tool to execute one-off analyses, rather than a tool that can be shared among various users to support ongoing business operations.
… and the size of your model may outgrow Excel
Excel is a generic modeling tool that can be extended with a number of add-ins to support mathematical modeling, but it has not been designed to handle large real-life mathematical modeling problems with millions of decision variables and constraints, leveraging the existing sparsity of input and output data.
AIMMS offers an easy way to boost your modeling power
When you need the flexibility and ease of use that a tool like Excel offers for prototyping, but at the same time need to deliver a robust decision support application suited to support real-life operations and leveraging best-of-breed optimization techniques, AIMMS offers a better alternative, because:
- Specifying a large number of often similar relationships can be done using indexed identifiers and definitions for these identifiers,
- Modifying the size of any index set in AIMMS is natural, as there is a complete separation between structure and data,
- Adding or removing dimensions takes place in the language and does not require the copying of cells or creating more worksheets,
- Importing data from Excel and writing results to Excel is easy with predefined AIMMS functions,
- Adding and managing both internal and external procedures is a straightforward task using the AIMMS language and model explorer,
- Visualizing the structure of the entire model can be done by the modeler, but the model editor also allows any other user to create customized overviews of the model structure for further maintenance,
- Solving large models can be done rapidly with the advanced solvers available with AIMMS.
AIMMS can also be used as an Excel add-in
AIMMS provides a more powerful and complete alternative to building decision support applications in Excel. However, when an Excel front-end is the preferred choice, but you still need the power of a full mathematical modeling language and/or a uniform interface to various numerical solvers, you can use AIMMS as an Excel add-in.
