How it works

Modern mathematical optimization

OptaPlanner is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine that lets everyday Java™ programmers solve optimization problems efficiently. It is also compatible with other JVM languages, such as Kotlin and Scala. Constraints apply on plain domain objects and can call existing code — there is no need to express them as mathematical equations.

Under the hood, OptaPlanner combines sophisticated Artificial Intelligence optimization algorithms (such as Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Late Acceptance and other metaheuristics) with very efficient score calculation and other state-of-the-art constraint solving techniques for NP-complete and NP-hard problems.

OptaPlanner is open source software, released under the Apache License. It is written in 100% pure Java™, runs on any JVM and is available in the Maven Central repository.

See the OptaPlanner documentation for the reference manual, published with every Apache KIE release.