Are the commercial offerings you mentioned better than TimeFold? [0] (formerly known as OptaPlanner before the main developers forked it)
TimeFold's heuristics-based approach makes fast solutions to even highly-complex scenarios within the reach of anyone who can write Java or Python expressions that evaluate to true when constraints are satisfied.
Huh, didn't know Optaplanner was forked. Bit sad, you would have thought it was good fit for IBM to all the enterprisey business automation stuff. Does Optaplanner have anyone left working on IBM(/RH) side?
Anyways, I wish the best for Timefold team, hopefully they can find success independently. With all the money sloshing around for all sorts of dumb AI projects, I think Timefold definitely deserves a portion too.
Could you elaborate on how OptaPlanner/Timefold wasn't ergonomic?
I 'd love to understand this better, so we can improve it in Timefold Community.
To help deal with new problems, we're creating out-of-the-box quickstarts for common use cases:
https://github.com/TimefoldAI/timefold-quickstarts
As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)
Basically, the documentation was set up so that I could come in and do a bunch of the example problems fairly easily, but the part where I model my own problem and execute/solve that was always underserved. Or it felt like that to me anyway. I don’t have a background in the theory, but I can easily see that it could solve my problems if only I could figure it out.
> As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)
Yeah, I don’t begrudge you that. It’s just that when I see that multithreading is locked away I just know that the moment I start using the product I’ll find out my toy problems are enterprise scale. Sort of like murpheys law, but for software features.
We're still figuring out a good, clear, honest pricing model for Enterprise that works well across company sizes (small - big), industries (healthcare vs telecom vs ...) and usage frequency (strategic vs operational planning).
We're happy to send you our pricing table version 1 (use contact us form on Timefold website), but we need your feedback if it fits your business model, deployment model, usage model, etc to validate our pricing model.
Just fork the community edition and add your own implementation of "nearby selection" and "multithreaded solving"... in effect, you get the enterprise edition for free, you just have to pay your own developers. Believe it or not, there are software companies that would go this route. I worked for one... as a developer, my time was far less important than the penny pinching and the heavy bureaucracy required for procurement.
It would cost less to pay Timefold whatever price they quote.
A lot of these companies started out with listed pricing and then grew and got crazy expensive. One of the nice things about the Mosek solver is that the price is listed and it is reasonable. I just dislike their API and documentation as it's written for mathematicians and not business SMEs.
> their API and documentation as it's written for mathematicians and not business SMEs
I've never worked with any of these, but that's what I would expect as well. API documentation that describes how to solve each kind of mathematical optimization problem.
Do you have an example of an optimization solver with API documentation for business SMEs?
Yeah. GUROBI makes it really easy to just do something like
m.addConstr(x+y<=limit);
Where m is a model object, x & y are decision variables and limit is a constant.
The above is a no brainer for any business expert. Some solvers are a LOT more low level though and you have to think of the problem in matrix form and specify row/column stuff and it's a lot more involved and assumes significantly more knowledge of the user than the former.
TimeFold's heuristics-based approach makes fast solutions to even highly-complex scenarios within the reach of anyone who can write Java or Python expressions that evaluate to true when constraints are satisfied.
[0] https://timefold.ai/