The Red Hat build of the open source embeddable planning engine OptaPlanner is now available in the vendor's Application Foundations portfolio in an effort to help organizations significantly reduce costs, improve service quality, meet employee needs, and limit carbon emissions, a Red Hat spokesperson told SDxCentral.

"Every organization faces planning problems; that is, they provide products and services with a limited set of constrained resources (employees, assets, time, and money)," the spokesperson said. A scalable planning application like OptaPlanner, however, helps organizations navigate those complexities, which are strikingly similar to those that impacted the recent Southwest Airlines meltdown.

"OptaPlanner is an excellent tool for navigating complex situations with multiple variables," they said. Common use cases for the tool include optimizing technician assignments, routing responsibilities, employee rostering, service planning, payroll, workforce scheduling, equipment or site planning, and maintenance scheduling.

Red Hat explained the employee rostering capability, for example, gathers inputs like required skills, employee availability and employee fairness to build a schedule optimized for each variable. OptaPlanner's routing optimization, they added, works by improving the stopping sequence of delivery trucks and public transportation like buses, taxis, and airplanes, which "heavily reduces driving time and fuel consumption compared to manual planning."

OptaPlanner helps "normal Java programmers" efficiently solve planning-related problems by combining optimization heuristics and metaheuristics while maintaining efficient score calculations. Under the hood, the tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) optimization algorithms like Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Late Acceptance, and best practice constraint solving techniques, they explained.

Red Hat sponsors OptaPlanner, employs the project's core developers, and offers enterprise support and consultancy for the enterprise version of the community project – Red Hat's build of OptaPlanner – as part of a product subscription. The vendor's solution architects help customers define the right architecture for their organizational scope, and services teams ensure reliable production implementations. The offer also includes a 24/7 support team and access to the OptaPlanner team at Red Hat, according to the vendor.

The free community version of the OptaPlanner tool boasts fewer features than Red Hat's build. Compared to the community version, the new offer includes backport bug fixes to maintenance branches, performance testing and sizing, QA certification, full roadmap impact, private 24/7 support, maintenance releases on a 6-week cadence, and one-off releases for urgent customer issues.