Article overview

22 years ago, in 1998, we released the first native 32 bit windows version of GAMS. This allowed modelers to implement much bigger models than possible before. A year later, we introduced our 32-bit IDE (for those of you young enough to remember, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 were state of the art back then). A lot of time has passed, and 64 bit is everywhere, even on your mobile phone.

GAMS offices are geographically distributed between different cities in the US (GAMS Development Corp.) and Germany (GAMS Software GmbH). The teams try to meet regularly - this time we enjoyed our Christmas party at Henk Mulder’s cooking school, where we could try our hands at preparing our own Christmas dinner. Not everyone was there, but fortunately it still worked a treat - have a look at the pictures.

This year, Lleny, Franz, Lutz, Michael, and Steve traveled to Seattle for the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2019. Lutz and Steve held a Pre-Conference Workshop on Saturday, talking about GAMS and our interactive web application framework GAMS MIRO, which was well received. On Tuesday, Michael gave a Conference Talk about Solving Energy System Models with GAMS on HPC platforms.

GAMS was attending the OR2019 in Dresden. But I don’t want to report about the conference itself at this point. We gave a workshop, held talks, and had a booth - the usual. However, in Dresden, I was asked not for the first time what GAMS actually does at such a conference.

Three very exciting and well-organized workshops on advanced GAMS features as well as CGE modeling took place this May. For this adventure, Michael, Steve and Freddy from GAMS teamed up with Agapi Somwaru who recently retired from USDA and Xinshen Diao from IFPRI, two experts in CGE modeling. Yumei Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) was our main local contact for the entire trip. After arriving in Beijing and having the opportunity to visit some incredible places like the Summer Palace and the Great Wall, we started our first two-day workshop in Beijing. CGE modeling in GAMS turned out to be a hot topic! Yumei had to reschedule our room twice, since more than a hundred people had registered for the course.

In April this year, Franz, Lleny, Freddy, and Marius traveled to Austin for the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. Franz and Freddy held a Pre-Conference Workshop on Sunday morning, talking about GAMS and our interactive web application framework GAMS MIRO, which was well received. Then in the evening, the conference started.

GAMS staff Michael Bussieck and Robin Schuchmann attended the meeting Mathematical Optimization for the Hidden Champions of the GOR working group Real World Optimization at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) in Pforzheim, Germany. The focus of the 2-day event was on optimization-based analysis and decision making, especially from the perspective of small businesses in the manufacturing industry.

As usual, CAPD was a well-organized 2-day conference. It is small enough that there are no parallel sessions. So the group was together from breakfast through dinner, which allows for and fosters lots of interaction on professional and social levels. The venue - CMU’s campus and the conference dinner at Monterey Bay - was very pleasant and conducive to good discussion. We enjoyed the opportunity to connect with some GAMS users from industry there to hear about their projects and to answer some of their questions along the way.