Summer is here, but we're not resting! Not all of us anyway. This release brings features, as well as an assortment of bug fixes and enhancements.

Featured update: Fairness and Load Balancing

Providing optimized schedules is only one part of the problem. And if our employees see that our schedule isn't being fair to them, because Ann is getting three times as many shifts as Dan is, they will not be very happy and the business will struggle. The business may even run into labour law issues.

That is why we are introducing a load balancing collector for Constraint Streams. You can read all about it in Fairness and load balancing section of the documentation.

Besides that, we have added some quality of life improvements:

• ScoreAnalysis now provides more information about itself, including a useful textual summary of the analysis.
• The solver can now trigger an event when the first initialized solution shows up, letting you know when the construction heuristic ends and local search begins.

All of these improvements and bugfixes are also available in Timefold Solver for Python. Have you checked it out yet?

Changelog

🚀 Features

• Add support for fairness constraints (#918), closes #918
• Improve ScoreAnalysis debug information (#923), closes #923
• Allow to consume the initialized solution (#915), closes #915

🐛 Fixes

• Only include tail chain move when using a single var (#936), closes #936
• Do not fail on solution/entity classes as interfaces (#934), closes #934
• Continue the warmup when one configuration fails
• Update the best score image of the benchmark section
• Fail fast when local search starts from an uninitialized solution

Contributors

We'd like to thank the following people for their contributions:

• Christopher Chianelli
• Frederico Gonçalves (@zepfred)
• Lukáš Petrovický (@triceo)
• lee-carlon

Timefold Solver Community Edition is an open source project, and you are more than welcome to contribute as well! For more, see Contributing.

Should your business need to scale to truly massive data sets or require enterprise-grade support, check out Timefold Solver Enterprise Edition.

How to use Timefold Solver

To see Timefold Solver in action, check out the quickstarts.

With Maven or Gradle, add the ai.timefold.solver : timefold-solver-core : 1.12.0 dependency in your pom.xml to get started.

You can also import the Timefold Solver Bom (ai.timefold.solver : timefold-solver-bom : 1.12.0) to avoid duplicating version numbers when adding other Timefold Solver dependencies later on.

Additional notes

The changelog and the list of contributors above are automatically generated. It excludes contributions to certain areas of the repository, such as CI and build automation. This is done for the sake of brevity and to make the user-facing changes stand out more.