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Solve planning and scheduling problems with OptaPlanner

A fast, easy-to-use, open source AI constraint solver for software developers

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Try OptaPlanner
Download 8.23.0.Final
  1. Download and unzip.
  2. Run runQuickstarts.sh (Linux/macOS)
    or runQuickstarts.bat (Windows).
Requires JDK 11 or higher to run.
Documentation
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User guide 8.23.0.Final
Clone the Quickstarts code.

What can OptaPlanner do?

OptaPlanner optimizes plans and schedules with hard constraints and soft constraints.
It reduces costs substantially, improves service quality, fulfills employee wishes and lowers carbon emissions.

Vehicle routing (VRP)

Quicker routes for a fleet of vehicles.

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Employee rostering

Assign shifts to employees by skills and availability.

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Maintenance scheduling

Timely upkeep of machinery and equipment.

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Conference scheduling

Schedule speakers and talks by availability and topic.

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School timetabling

Compacter schedules for teachers and students.

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Task assignment

Assign tasks by priority, skills and affinity.

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Cloud optimization

Bin packing and defragmentation of cloud resources.

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Job shop scheduling

Reduce makespan for assembly lines.

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Modern mathematical optimization

OptaPlanner is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine. It enables everyday programmers to solve optimization problems efficiently. Constraints apply on plain domain objects and can call existing code. It is Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and Functional Programming (FP) friendly. There’s no need to input constraints as mathematical equations.

OptaPlanner supports
  • Continuous planning to weekly publish the schedule, 3 weeks before execution
  • Non-disruptive replanning for changes to an already published schedule
  • Real-time planning to react on real-time disruptions in the plan within milliseconds
  • Overconstrained planning when there are too few resources to cover all the work
  • Pinning so the user is still in control over the schedule

Under the hood, OptaPlanner combines sophisticated Artificial Intelligence optimization algorithms (such as Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Late Acceptance and other metaheuristics) with very efficient score calculation and other state-of-the-art constraint solving techniques for NP-complete or NP-hard problems.

Compatibility

OptaPlanner works directly from: OptaPlanner integrates seamlessly with: OptaPlanner runs on:

OptaPlanner is open source software, released under the Apache License.

Code example

To optimize a problem from Java™ code, add the optaplanner-core jar and call Solver.solve():

SolverFactory<MyRoster> factory = SolverFactory.create(...);

// My domain specific class as input
MyRoster problem = ...;

Solver<MyRoster> solver = factory.buildSolver();
// My domain specific class as output
MyRoster solution = solver.solve(problem);

for (MyShift shift : solution.getShifts()) {
    // Each shift is now assigned to an employee
    assertNotNull(shift.getEmployee());
}

Try the hello world application.

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