Technology Radar
Timefold Solver is an open-source constraint optimization engine for Java and Kotlin and the modern successor to OptaPlanner. It solves logistical planning problems, such as vehicle routing, employee rostering, task assignment and maintenance scheduling, where the space of possibilities is far too large to search exhaustively. Although branded under the broader AI umbrella, it involves no training data or learned model, relying instead on heuristic search over constraints you define. It models absolute business rules as hard constraints that a returned plan can’t violate and operational targets as soft constraints that it optimizes within. We’ve successfully used Timefold Solver in production in the supply chain domain to rapidly model complex business scenarios.
