External Procedures and Functions

Why call external procedures

Even though AIMMS offers easy-to-use multidimensional data structures combined with a powerful programming language, there are often good reasons to relay parts of the execution of your model to external procedures and functions written in e.g. C/C++ or FORTRAN. The capability to call external procedures and functions in your AIMMS application allows you

• to re-use existing software (e.g. a library of financial functions, or a collection of accurate, nonlinear process models),

• to speed up selected computations by making use of dedicated data structures which are difficult to implement in AIMMS itself, and

• to provide links to external data sources (e.g. on-line data feeds or proprietary databases).

This chapter

This chapter describes the steps you have to follow for linking libraries of external procedures and functions to AIMMS. Such procedures and functions can be used to manipulate AIMMS data during the execution of a model. In addition, external libraries may contain functions that can be used inside the constraints of a nonlinear mathematical program.

• Introduction
• Declaration of External Procedures and Functions
• Win32 Calling Conventions
• External Functions in Constraints
• C Versus FORTRAN conventions