We've just released Analytic Solver V2025 Q2, with new versions of Analytic Solver Desktop and Cloud (for Excel users), Solver SDK (for developers), and our cloud platform RASON. This release features both speed and usability improvements, a smarter AI Agent to assist with model building, and support for the new/improved Metalog 2 family of probability distributions.
Faster When Using, Not Just Solving
Customers (and prospective customers) regularly bring us large models that stretch limits in different ways. We've long supported models with millions of decision variables and constraints. But for example, customers have brought us models where one constraint uses a formula that depends on several other cells -- where each of these depends on several other cells -- to 10,000 or more levels -- and we've found ways to make our analysis of those "deep formula chains" faster. When we find a "math + computer science" solution for these "stretch" cases, all customers end up benefiting.
More recently, customers have brought us models with so many constraints, formulas or Excel defined names that it took a long time to display or update the Task Pane. Other customers have brought us models with large numbers of quadratic constraints (each requiring a "Hessian evaluation"), or with constraint right hand sides deeply dependent on decision variables. In our V2025 Q2 release, Analytic Solver is much faster in all these cases.
And for those solving with the Gurobi Solver Engine, our V2025 Q2 release includes the latest 12.0.2 release from our friends at Gurobi Optimization, with their latest fixes and speed improvements.
Enhanced Excel Support, Smarter Human Support
Analytic Solver V2025 Q2 includes improved support for Excel models using the new LET function (the LAMBDA function was already supported). We've also improved support for recalculation of optimization and simulation models that use certain advanced Excel functions, notably our Psi functions and our support for DMN-style decision tables and "box functions".
And our AI Agent in V2025 Q2 is even better at helping you enhance and even find and fix problems in your model: It now takes advantage of both the latest ChatGPT large language model with our RAG support, and "model diagnostics" from our PSI Interpreter to better understand the structure of your model, and how it might be fixed or improved.
New Support for Metalog2 Distributions
Way back in 2017, Frontline Systems was among the very first software vendors to implement support for the new (introduced in 2016) Metalog family of probability distributions -- see also the Metalog YouTube Channel. This family of distributions has some remarkable properties: virtually unlimited shape flexibility, flexible bounds, simple, closed-form quantile function (inverse CDF) equations, a simple, closed-form PDF (probability density function), and Bayesian updating in closed form in light of new data(!)
Over the last 8 years, the Metalog distributions have been widely adopted, in applications ranging from astrophysics and cosmology, crystallography, integrated circuit design and nanomaterials, to volcanic discharges in earth science, toxin levels in drinking water, oil-field production forecasting, electric vehicles and hydrogen production in renewable energy, cybersecurity risk mitigation, and conditional value at risk in quantitative finance. (It is, candidly, strange to us that after 8 years, @RISK -- the "old but good" competitive Excel add-in for risk analysis -- has never supported the Metalog distributions, despite their fundamental advantages for simulation and risk analysis users.)
Now in 2025, Dr. Tom Keelin, inventor of Metalog distributions, and two other authors are publishing a new paper On the Properties of the Metalog Distributions which refines and, in special cases, redefines the Metalog family of distributions (improving cases where the fitting process could yield infeasible results), earning the title "Metalog 2". And in Analytic Solver V2025 Q2, the refinements in this paper are fully implemented via our PsiMetalog2() function and our built-in automatic distribution fitting. As in so many cases in the past, Analytic Solver users are first to gain access to this new/improved capability -- at no extra cost for current licensees!
