Collaborative Project Development
This chapter discusses the options you have in AIMMS to organize a project in such a way that it becomes possible to effectively work on the project with multiple developers. While it is very natural to start working on a project with a single developer, at some time during the development of an AIMMS application, the operational requirements of the problem you are modeling may become so demanding that it requires multiple developers to accomplish the task.
From prototyping phase…
During the initial prototyping phase of a model, an AIMMS project is usually still quite small, allowing a single developer to take care of the complete development of the prototype. The productivity tools of AIMMS allow you to quickly implement different formulations and analyze their results, while you are avoiding the overhead of having to synchronize the efforts of multiple people working on the prototype.
…to operational phase
During the development of an operational AIMMS application this situation may change drastically. When an AIMMS application is intended to be used on a daily basis, it usually involves one or more of the following tasks:
retrieving the input data from one or more data sources,
validation and transformation of input data,
extending the core optimization application with various, computationally possibly demanding, operational requirements,
preparing and writing output data to one or more data sources,
building a professionally looking end-user GUI, and/or
integrating the application into the existing business environment.
Depending on the size of the application, implementing all of these tasks may become too demanding for a single developer.
Dividing a project into sub-projects
One possible approach to allow multiple developers to work on a single AIMMS application is to divide the project into several logical sub-projects, either based on the tasks listed in the previous paragraph, or more closely related to the logic of your application. AIMMS supports sub-projects in the form of model libraries. Using libraries especially makes sense, if the functionality developed in a library can be re-used by multiple AIMMS applications. If a library is small enough, indivual developers may take on the development of the library.
Managing project source using a VCS
In the software development world teams commonly use a Version
Control System, such as
git,
subversion, or
TFS, to share
and merge their coding work to a common repository. As all development
sources of an AIMMS application are stored as readable text files
(a.o. .aimms, .ams and .xml), AIMMS projects can be easily
managed using the version control system of your choice. Using a version
control system will make it straightforward to work together on a single
code base in parallel by merging the contributions of the various team
members, and to use branches to differentiate between development and
production code, or to work on multiple developments independently.
Using version control for your AIMMS projects will usually result in
higher productivity and more control.
No VCS integration
Although AIMMS effectively supports the use of a version control system for the development of your AIMMS applications, the AIMMS IDE does not offer integration with any specific version control system. All version control systems come with commandline and/or graphical tools for regular version control tasks such as committing, showing logs, diffing two versions, merging, creating branches and tags, and so on. You should use these tools, whenever you want to commit your changes to an AIMMS project under version control.