INFORMS Annual Meeting in Anaheim

This year, George, Adam, and Steve traveled to Anaheim for the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2021. This was the first INFORMS conference held in person since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Steve and Adam gave numerous talks and tech tutorials throughout the week on topics such as GAMS Transfer and GAMS Engine.

While attendance was lower than in years past, there was a steady stream of both existing and potential users who spoke with us at the GAMS booth in the exhibit hall. We greatly enjoyed meeting new acquaintances and connecting with old friends at the event. As always the conference featured a wide variety of interesting talks and workshops. We are already looking forward to attending INFORMS next year!

Our Technical Tutorial

Turning Models Into Applications – GAMS Engine and GAMS Transfer

Presented by: Adam Christensen & Steven Dirkse

The right tools help you deploy your GAMS model and maximize the impact of your decision support application. GAMS Engine is a powerful tool for solving GAMS models, either on-prem or in the cloud. Engine acts as a broker between applications or users with GAMS models to solve and the computational resources used for this task. Central to Engine is a modern REST API that provides an interface to a scalable Kubernetes-based system of services, providing API, database, queue, and a configurable number of GAMS workers. GAMS Transfer is an API (available in Python, Matlab, and soon R) that makes moving data between GAMS and your computational environment fast and easy. By leveraging open source data science tools such as Pandas/Numpy, GAMS Transfer is able to take advantage of a suite of useful (and platform independent) I/O tools to deposit data into GDX or withdraw GDX results to a number of data endpoints (i.e., visualizations, databases, etc.).

In case you would like to get a more in depth view, just check our playlist on our Youtube-channel, where you can find the on-demand videos of this talk!

Below you find the slides of our technical tutorial: