OptaPlanner in Practice

This course uses a practical approach to teaching OptaPlanner. It provides participants with the tools needed to perform the basic functions of this tool.

Planner introduction

• What is OptaPlanner?
• What is a planning problem?
• Use Cases and examples

Bin Packaging Problem Example

• Problem statement
• Problem size
• Domain model diagram
• Main method
• Solver configuration
• Domain model implementation
• Score configuration

Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP)

• Problem statement
• Problem size
• Domain model
• Main method
• Chaining
• Solver configuration
• Domain model implementation
• Score configuration

Planner configuration

• Overview
• Solver configuration
• Model your planning problem
• Use the Solver

Score calculation

• Score terminology
• Choose a Score definition
• Calculate the Score
• Score calculation performance tricks
• Reusing the Score calculation outside the Solver

Optimization algorithms

• Search space size in the real world
• Does Planner find the optimal solution?
• Architecture overview
• Optimization algorithms overview
• Which optimization algorithms should I use?
• SolverPhase
• Scope overview
• Termination
• SolverEventListener
• Custom SolverPhase

Move and neighborhood selection

• Move and neighborhood introduction
• Generic Move Selectors
• Combining multiple MoveSelectors
• EntitySelector
• ValueSelector
• General Selector features
• Custom moves

Construction heuristics

• First Fit
• Best Fit
• Advanced Greedy Fit
• the Cheapest insertion
• Regret insertion

Local search

• Local Search concepts
• Hill Climbing (Simple Local Search)
• Tabu Search
• Simulated Annealing
• Late Acceptance
• Step counting hill climbing
• Late Simulated Annealing (experimental)
• Using a custom Termination, MoveSelector, EntitySelector, ValueSelector or Acceptor

Evolutionary algorithms

• Evolutionary Strategies
• Genetic Algorithms

Hyperheuristics

Exact methods

• Brute Force
• Depth-first Search

Benchmarking and tweaking

• Finding the best Solver configuration
• Doing a benchmark
• Benchmark report
• Summary statistics
• Statistics per dataset (graph and CSV)
• Advanced benchmarking

Repeated planning

• Introduction to repeated planning
• Backup planning
• Continuous planning (windowed planning)
• Real-time planning (event based planning)

Drools

• Short introduction to Drools
• Writing Score Function in Drools

Integration

• Overview
• Persistent storage
• SOA and ESB
• Other environment