AIMMS 3.9

In March 2009, Paragon has released the latest Maintenance Release of the AIMMS modeling system: AIMMS 3.9. On this page you can read about the new features in AIMMS 3.9. More details about AIMMS 3.9 can be found in the release notes.

Based on the newest insights from research & academia, requests from our customers, the latest technological developments and our personal ideas and experience, the following major features have been implemented in AIMMS 3.9:

Download AIMMS 3.9

Please note the following differences between the compiler/execution engine of AIMMS 3.8 and AIMMS 3.9:

AIMMS 3.10 Feature Releases

In our new release cycle we will no longer release Maintenance Releases. Instead, we will release Feature Releases and Production Releases. In June 2009, we have released our first Feature Release: AIMMS 3.10 FR1.

This release will be followed by further Feature Releases during the remainder of 2009, building up to the Production Release of AIMMS 3.10, planned for Q1, 2010. More details about AIMMS 3.10 can be found in the release notes. On this page you can also read about the new features in AIMMS 3.10:

Download AIMMS 3.10

New Features AIMMS 3.9

Nonlinear Math Program Inspector

The Math Program Inspector (MPI) in AIMMS is now available for nonlinear models (NLP). The MPI can list the generated nonlinear constraints and several new nonlinear-related statistics. The MPI matrix view can visually indicate matrix blocks that contain nonlinearities (see picture), and the MPI also reports the reductions that have been realized by the nonlinear presolver.

Benefits: The MPI enables you to drill down into your nonlinear programs to analyze the causes of infeasibilities, unrealistic results and other problems associated with solving your math program.

New features of the CPLEX solver accessible from AIMMS:

Storing multiple MIP solutions with solution pool filters
Lazy constraints
User-cut pool
Branching callbacks

The power of branching callbacks is illustrated with a new, advanced variant of the AIMMS Outer Approximation (AOA) algorithm, based on the approach of Quesada & Grossman (1992). This approach uses branch-and-cut in combination with outer approximation, and often solves convex models with binary variables much faster than other algorithms.

Benefits: AIMMS enables you to use advanced CPLEX 11 options to develop specialized applications without the need to write complicated code or solver files.

New solver: Gurobi

AIMMS 3.9 supports the new Gurobi solver. Gurobi is a brand new high-performance optimization solver for linear programming (LP) and mixed integer programming (MIP). The Gurobi MIP solver allows for shared memory parallelism to take full advantage of modern multiple cores and multiple sockets architectures.

New version of the MOSEK solver

AIMMS supports the latest version of the MOSEK solver, version 5. The MOSEK 5 solver can be used with AIMMS to solve LP, QP, QCP, MIP, MIQP and MIQCP models, and now also convex NLP models. The interior-point optimizer takes advantage of using multiple CPUs or cores if available.

Additional database functionality

A number of database functions has been introduced, which give the AIMMS user access to detailed database information, like the number and names of all tables in a database and the details of all columns in a table.

New features in the Integrated Development
Environment (IDE)

The AIMMS debugger can be activated automatically on the line where a run-time error occurs, helping you to locate and fix problems quickly during application development.
The Cross Library Reference dialog box offers a feature to manage preferred and non-preferred references between projects, and it allows for the printing of all cross references.
The new Identifier Info dialog box offers an easy way to quickly jump to the declaration, attributes or data of an identifier based on its name.

Enhanced Pivot Table functionality

The Pivot Table functionality has been enhanced extensively, making it an even more versatile object to use in your GUI:

You can display cell values as small (customizable colored) horizontal bars in the Pivot Table (see picture and demo).
You can show multiple line element text in the Pivot Table.
You can specify whether or not aggregators should be present for each identifier separately.
You can use indexed references and identifiers that are indexed over the set AllIdentifiers to specify the default properties for identifiers in a Pivot Table.
End-users can restore or reset the Pivot Table state.

Other enhancements in the Graphical User Interface (GUI)

GIS Link: you can obtain the background for Network Objects also from Microsoft Virtual Earth server. The Geocoding functionality has been reintroduced, allowing you to retrieve latitude/longitude coordinates automatically.

Gantt Chart: you can give rows alternating background colors, and the background of specific periods along the x-axis can be colored individually (see picture).
Pie Chart: you can automatically calculate and display the percentages of all pie slices.
Excel: end-users can copy data more easily from an AIMMS GUI to Excel, using a new function to copy data from a Table, Composite Table or Pivot Table to a specific range in an Excel sheet.

The AIMMS 3.9 New Features as PDF.

New Features AIMMS 3.10

Change Coefficients in Math Program Inspector

You can now change the value of linear matrix coefficients directly from within the Math Program Inspector. This allows you to interactively perform sensitivity analysis on the linear matrix coefficients of your problem, without the need to regenerate the matrix.

Tooltips for Buttons

AIMMS enables you to build very powerful interfaces around your model, with buttons that enable end-users to control and run optimizations. To help new end-users to understand the buttons that you provide, you can specify tooltips to provide extra information about the action(s) behind the buttons.

Pivot Table State File Manager

The versatile AIMMS Pivot Table allows developers and end-users to create their own data views, arranging the columns and rows as they wish. These views are stored as states. With this new tool, the developer can now manage the Pivot Table states that are stored in the .UserState and .DeveloperState files of your project and libraries. The State File Manager gives you an overview of all states that are stored in a specific state file, from which you can delete states and/or jump to the pages on which the corresponding Pivot Tables are located.

Pivot Table Page Functions

You can now specify a string parameter for the Pivot Table property Specific State Name (on the General tab). By changing the value of this string parameter, you can e.g. store several states for a single Pivot Table. To support you in saving, loading and deleting these states to/from the state files, three new page functions have been added:

PivotTableSaveState
PivotTableReloadState
PivotTableDeleteState

The Pivot Table example has been extended with a library that uses these new functions. It includes a right-mouse menu that can be assigned to a Pivot Table, after which the user can save, load, or delete states for that Pivot Table. You can include this library in your own project as well.

Coordinates of Page Objects

When you select one or more page objects on a page in edit mode, the object coordinates, dimensions and type of object are displayed in the status bar. This further simplifies the alignment of your page objects, especially when these objects are located on different pages.

Text Representation

To provide easier insight in a model, the possibility to look at a text file format of (part of) your model is now also available from the View windows. Via the Text Representation submenu in the right-mouse menu and View menu in the menu bar and associated short-cut keys, you can view either the selected nodes (Ctrl + t), or the complete model (Ctrl + Shift + t) in its text representation. The new Text Representation submenu has replaced the View Flat Model menu item in the Model Explorer.

AIMMSpack Location

The AIMMSpack is a convenient file format to pack all related files into a single file for distribution. When extracting a .aimmspack file, you can now directly select the current folder as the target location. This allows you to keep the extracted project close to the location of the .aimmspack file.

The AIMMS 3.10 New Features as PDF.

Previous releases contain the following new features:

Read on:

New Features AIMMS 3.9 and 3.10