AIMMS - User Interface

AIMMS User Interface highlights

AIMMS offers a large set of User Interface features which are highly unique and make AIMMS stand out compared to other mathematical modeling tools. The following, non-extensive, list presents some of these highlights

The AIMMS Integrated Development Environment

AIMMS offers a modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE), with Office XP style menus and toolbars, and similar functionality as seen in Visual Studio .NET. The AIMMS IDE is available both during model development and deployment of a model using the graphical end-user interface of AIMMS.

The AIMMS IDE offers:

dockable windows that provide access to the productivity tools of AIMMS
a state of the art syntax highlighting control with personal profile options
document windows displayed in either MDI or tabbed MDI mode, for displaying such items as

The pictures below illustrate some examples of the AIMMS IDE.

AIMMS IDE with Model Explorer

and attribute window

AIMMS IDE with Page Manager

and end-user page

AIMMS IDE with end-user page

containing various controls

Syntax highlighting control

The specially designed AIMMS syntax highlighting control supports features as:

User-configurable formatting for keywords, elements, strings, and identifier types
Collapsible code blocks
Bracket matching capabilities
Auto-indentation and indentation guidelines
Member lists (e.g. to select an identifier from a namespace, or a suffix)
Function and procedure prototype tooltips

With the syntax highlighting control of AIMMS, modifying AIMMS source code and visual code inspection will become much easier than working in traditional editors. Also, the user configurable formatting (personal profiles) and coloring makes it possible to clearly and visibly distinguish between variables and parameters in, for instance, constraint definitions.

Integrated GUI builder

In addition to a modeling environment, AIMMS offers an integrated tool for constructing a customized graphical user interface (GUI) for your decision support application. End-user screens can be created in an easy point-and-click manner, and can include various controls that are all tightly linked to multidimensional identifiers in your model.

Built-in AIMMS GUI controls

Examples of interface controls for displaying/modifying data or browsing through your application are:

multi-dimensional tables,
a flexible, and user-controllable pivot table,
2D- and 3D-charts (pie charts, bar charts, line and area charts, bubble charts, radar charts, polar charts, candle charts, HiLo and HiLoOpenClose charts, scatter plots, combination charts, 3D surface and bar charts, 3D scatter plots),
a Gantt chart control for visualizing time-phased planning and scheduling applications,
a network control for visualizing two-dimensional maps and flows including GIS support,
buttons,
sliders,
a navigation control for browsing through your application,
calendar and date-time picker controls,
document viewers to view various types of documents within an AIMMS page,
tabbed pages, to display a subtree of AIMMS pages in a tab control, and
an indexed page object, to repeatedly display another page (with objects containing data of multidimensional identifiers sliced over one or two element parameters) in a list or tabular format for all elements of the corresponding index set(s).

Support for integrating ActiveX controls

AIMMS supports the integration of custom ActiveX controls as first-class AIMMS controls, including point-and-click support for placing a control on a page and linking the control properties to identifiers in a model. If you need a custom control to be connected to AIMMS, please contact .

Advanced GUI support tools

To support you in creating complete end-user interfaces quickly, and in an easily maintainable fashion, AIMMS offers the following advanced tools:

the Page Manager allows you to specify a natural page order, with which you can guide an end-user through your application by adding special page manager-driven navigation controls to templates or pages,
the Template Manager enables you to create a uniform look and feel by allowing common objects (such as headers, footers, and navigation buttons) to be placed on hierarchically organized templates which can be inherited by multiple pages,
the Menu Builder allows you to create customized end-user menus and toolbars that can be added to your templates and pages.

Localization of end-user interfaces

Whenever you are requested to distribute your application to end-users who are not fluent in the language in which you originally developed the end-user interface, AIMMS offers a localization procedure which automatically separates all static strings used in the end-user interface of your application and stores these into a string parameter within your model. This allows you to provide a relatively smooth translation path of your application to the native language(s) of your end-users.

AIMMS Unicode version

If you have end-users on the Asian market who require a native version of your AIMMS application, only making use of AIMMS' built-in localization procedure is not sufficient, as Asian languages require the use of double-byte characters to represent native strings. To support you in such cases, AIMMS is also available in a separate Unicode version. The AIMMS Unicode version allows you to use Unicode characters in strings and set element descriptions in both your model and its end-user interface, and offers full support for communicating with files and databases containing either ASCII or Unicode data.

Multi-developer support

AIMMS offers support for multiple developers to work on a single AIMMS application. An applications can be divided into a main project and one or more library projects. Compared to the source code modules supported in previous AIMMS version (before 3.7), library projects can not only contain a part of the application’s model source, but also the associated pages, templates and menus to be included in the overall application end-user GUI. Each developer can edit one or more of these library projects independently of other developers and read/write security settings can be set for each library independently.

Next to allowing multiple developers to work on all aspects (i.e. model and GUI) of a single application, the multi-developer features also allows for effective reuse of shareable parts of an AIMMS application and the ability to create a standard look-and-feel across multiple applications (GUI setup in a library project can behave as your template). A cross-reference tool, to analyze the references between libraries (variables, parameters, pages, etc) support the coordination.

For a full description of the AIMMS User Interface see the User's Guide.

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