GAMS is one of the leading tool providers for the optimization industry, with offices in the US and Germany. With customers in more than 120 countries, GAMS is used by multinational companies, universities, research institutions and governments in many different areas, including the energy and chemical industries, for economic modeling, agricultural planning, or manufacturing.

Started as a project at the World Bank by an economic modeling group in the 1970s, GAMS was the first software system to combine the language of mathematical algebra with traditional concepts of computer programming in order to efficiently describe and solve optimization problems. Nowadays, algebraic modeling is considered to be the most productive way of implementing optimization models and decomposition methods for optimization problems.