Array Studio 7

Array Studio 7 is a complete maintenance and development environment that automatically supports advanced version control, team-support.

Model creation and especially maintenance is a major task in any constraint solver related project; a task that Array Technology has simplified significantly with the introduction of Array Studio 7 with its wide selection of variable types, declarative (i.e. not procedural) language and extensive use of easily comprehensible truth tables.

Full modeling support Array Studio 7 covers all the essential features expected in a modern modeling environment, and provides both textual and graphical interfaces to create, delete and modify variables and relations. Complete compiler integration Array Studio 7 works with the Array Compiler to not only compile but also verify models. Navigation between compiler and modeling environment is seamless and all compiler features are accessible through the graphical UI.
Analyzer Modeling is a continuous task of creation and testing. The quick turn-around time of the integrated analyzer significantly reduces the modeling time, and powerful analysis tools helps pinpoint problems and improve the model structure. Array Studio 7 has greatly improved the analysis tools provided by Array Technology. Many of these features are now available at design time, allowing the modeler to react to warnings while writing rules instead of waiting until compile time. Testing A generic full-featured and auto-generated Configurator UI allow quick interaction with the compiled model. Relation analysis More important than the relatively trivial task of editing a model, is the ability to analyze, debug and evaluate relations prior to deployment. With solution spaces commonly expressed in powers of ten, an analytical approach is critical, such as that offered by the integrated Analyzer.
Rule centric approach You know how your data is related, so why spend time setting up the skeleton for the model. This information can easily be derived from the rules themselves. So when you create a truth table with a number of columns these automatically become business rule objects and the values of each column become the elements of these business rule objects. In other words, you just have to set up the rules and then the objects will be derived from the rules, and the object data type is also automatically derived, so you don't have to spend time on tedious task such as defining objects.

External Data access
Relations between your business objects are almost never static. The big picture is more often than not, made up of many smaller pictures. You might have bill of materials in an ERP system while current package deals are maintained in a separate CRM system. While these types of information might be well maintained in separate systems, the two datasets impact each other in the daily running of the business. This is why Array Studio allows the modeler to create rules and property sets based on external data sources, and refresh these when needed. The Rule Centric approach means that even though new objects or elements appear in the external data source, these will automatically be included in the resulting model.

Local and Shared Repositories
Array Studio 7 is based on a local repository for each local installation. All objects are stored in this repository as well as the history. This documents the history of the objects and, even more important, it enables you to restore a previous version of the model. In an environment with more than one Array Studio 7 installation and more people working on the same models, Array Studio 7 allows you to connect to a shared repository, which is actually a standard relational database like MySql, SQL Server or Oracle. All Studio 7 installations can then synchronize their models with the shared repository. Array Studio 7 handles all the potential conflicts arising from having more people working on the same model.

Copy/Paste from Excel
If you already have your rules or business objects in Excel, a quick way to get started is to use the seamless copy/paste compatibility between Array Studio and Microsoft Excel.

Cloning and Linking
Many of the business objects and rules we define are not unique within the organization. Even though you might have several logical models in your organization you don't have to redefine common objects over and over. These can be inherited or shared from other models, and if changes are made in one place, the changes are instantly applied everywhere.
There are two ways of doing this. The first one is linking, which is simply a shallow copy of a business object or rule. All objects are named the same in each shallow copy. The second one is called cloning, where you can clone groups of objects and intelligently rename objects based on as many standard regular expressions as needed. This means that you could have one object called Tire, with all the attributes of a tire, and the clone this to four different clones each called front left, front right, rear left and rear right.
These two ways of sharing business objects are very powerful and will satisfy most needs, but there are certain very complex problems that require even more flexibility. Because of this we have also developed support for dynamic instantiation of something called sub models.

Dynamic instantiation of sub models
Array Studio 7 includes a new a groundbreaking feature called sub modeling. Certain especially complex problems require a feature called sub modeling. While the concept of sub modeling might seem simple and straight forward, and to some extent look like the type of problems that could be solved using Cloning and Linking, the actual implementation and modeling of such problems can be extremely complex. In order to reduce the complexity of this we have designed a number of editors for exactly this functionality.
Types of problems that not only require many objects of the same type, but also that these objects are aware of each other and might even require rules between each instantiation of the object, and not just the object and the rest of the logical model, need special techniques.
An example is a rack cabinet that can take a number of extension cards such as processing units, cooling units, storage units, power units etc. Each unit takes up a number of spaces and each unit might even have restrictions on which units it can be placed next to. While this seems to be a trivial problem, it is logically very complex. Array Studio 7 addresses this with the sub modeling tools that make it easy for a modeler to maintain an overview, while still maintaining an approach where no customized code has to be written to handle this.

Refactoring
Extensive automatic refactoring tools help the modeler maintain a consistent model, without orphans or forgotten objects. Renaming an object will be carried through the entire model.

Localization
Array Studio 7 supports full localization of all texts in the model, and also allows translators easy access to translate directly in Studio 7 or using external tools that can then be interfaced with through an external connection.

Auto Suggestion when writing rules
Array Studio 7 helps you write rules by suggesting the completion of your expressions, thereby making it easier, safer and faster to write rules.

Array Studio 7

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