Small to Large: Aid in Development and Debugging

Many GAMS users are overly impressed with how easily GAMS handles large models.  PC based GAMS can be used with tens of thousands of variables and equations.  Modelers often feel such a facility means they should always work on the full model.  The result is often a large, sometimes extremely large, model in the early stages of model development.  Debugging such large formulations is not easy.

The algebraic modeling style employed in GAMS is inherently expandable.  This offers interesting possibilities in terms of the strategy that may be employed for model development and debugging which are discussed herein.

Basics

Essence of the small to large approach

Steps for working from small to large

Making small parts of large models