Given the crucial role power distribution plays for the economy, and the challenges posed by renewable energy and increasing demand for electricity, ARPA-E is running the Grid Optimization Competition, which challenges participating teams to develop and test power system optimization and control algorithms on a range of different synthetic and real network models. This is another great example of how modeling and optimization impacts our lives and society! Watch the U.S. DOE competition announcement below:
General GAMS Update News Sales
Some of you might have noticed that coincident with releasing GAMS 30.1, we have introduced some changes to our licensing model . Below we summarize what has changed.
We have changed the way we allow users to test GAMS (“demo mode”). We now require registration on our website and generating a demo license before using the software. Some might find this process annoying, but before introducing this new scheme, we simply did have no idea how many people were using GAMS in demo mode. For a company trying to understand and serve its customer base, this was utterly unsatisfactory. With the new scheme, we collect and process some personal data, which we use to generate a named license file - after all, demo licenses are not meant to be shared between users. Four weeks later, all personal data is automatically deleted (names, email-address, IP-address, even the license file itself). We keep just enough data to compile statistics about how many demo licenses have been generated over time, and which countries and organisations these licenses are popular in.
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.
Atharv Bhosekar
Aileen Boehme
Adam Christensen
Alexander Meeraus
André Schnabel
Bruce McCarl
Christophe Gouel
Clemens Westphal
Evangelos Panos
Fred Fiand
Freddy Proske
George Franco
Hans Lofgren
Justine Broihan
Julien Harou
Leonard Kunz
Logan Randolph
Lutz Westermann
Mohammed Basheer
Marius Bützler
Michael Bussieck
Mateo Gallia
Renke Kuhlmann
Robin Schuchmann
Steve Dirkse
Stefan Mann