Mimi is a software toolkit produced by Aspentech for tackling supply-chain problems across all industries. It grew out of the practical needs of staff in oil refineries to be able to use an assortment of different techniques together when tackling the hard planning and scheduling problems which they faced.

Linear Programming (LP) is the foundation of most planning in oil refineries but the LP solution cannot be implemented directly. Instead it has to be broken down into a workable schedule, i.e. a series of batch operations on the various process units. Mimi made it possible to develop a consistent suite of applications which worked together to tackle the entire problem in a coherent way.

Although retaining its place in the oil industry, Mimi has since moved out into manufacturing and logistics and is now targeted at the supply-chain market.

The main components which we use are:

• the Mimi database, macros and user interface;
• the Mimi/E expert system language;
• the Mimi/MJ and Mimi/S scheduling facilities;
• the Mimi/LP facilities for building and running LP and MIP models;

In addition to these there are modules for:

• demand management;
• forecasting;
• SQL access to databases.

Mimi/E is the main "glue" for connecting together the various components to create an application. It is not a conventional programming language like Visual Basic or C but is declarative like LISP or Prolog. This creates challenges for programmers who are used to conventional languages and may have no experience of declarative languages.

As a service to the broad community of Mimi users, we are making available an internal document which explains how the Mimi/E language works and how to use it. This document has been prepared by Eudoxus Systems and reflects our understanding: it is not an "official" document and is based solely on our observations of Mimi's behaviour. No undertaking is given as to its accuracy for any specific version of Mimi.

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