What is OptaPlanner?

OptaPlanner is an AI constraint solver. It optimizes planning and scheduling problems, such as the Vehicle Routing Problem, Employee Rostering, Maintenance Scheduling, Task Assignment, School Timetabling, Cloud Optimization, Conference Scheduling, Job Shop Scheduling, Bin Packing and many more. Every organization faces such challenges: assign a limited set of constrained resources (employees, assets, time and/or money) to provide products or services. OptaPlanner delivers more efficient plans, which reduce costs and improve service quality.

OptaPlanner is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine. It enables everyday Java programmers to solve optimization problems efficiently. It is also compatible with other JVM languages (such as Kotlin and Scala). Constraints apply on plain domain objects and can call existing code. There’s no need to input constraints as mathematical equations. 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.

OptaPlanner is open source software, released under the Apache License. It is written in 100% pure Java™, runs on any JVM and is available in the Maven Central repository too. It works with Quarkus and Spring Boot.

Try OptaPlanner
Download 8.11.1.Final

Download the zip and unzip it.
Run examples/runExamples.sh (Linux/macOS).
Or run examples/runExamples.bat (Windows).

Requires Java™ to run.

Get started
User guide 8.11.1.Final

Clone the Quickstarts code.

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

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

SolverFactory<MyRoster> factory = SolverFactory
    .createFromXmlResource(".../mySolverConfig.xml");
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());
}

Latest blog posts

How much faster is Java 17?

Wed 15 September 2021

Geoffrey De Smet
Constraint Streams get some more love

Thu 19 August 2021

Lukáš Petrovický
Let’s OptaPlan your jBPM tasks (part 2) - BPM Task assigning in the cloud

Mon 26 July 2021

Walter Medvedeo
Static website generation with Java, Maven and JBake

Wed 9 June 2021

Geoffrey De Smet
Writing fast constraints with OptaPlanner: the secret recipe

Tue 25 May 2021

Lukáš Petrovický
The path to OptaPlanner enlightenment starts in the logs

Thu 6 May 2021

Geoffrey De Smet
Batch solving a ActiveMQ queue that contains planning problem data sets in a scalable way

Thu 25 March 2021

Radovan Synek

Blog archive