Employee Scheduling In OptaPlanner With Constraint Stream

An Introduction To Employee Scheduling

Every company has to deal with planning issues, such as providing products or services with a certain number of resource constraints (employees, assets, time, and money). Employee scheduling is one such planning issue: assigning shifts to employees. Employer shifts rostering issues are resolved using the OptaPlanner engine by OptaWeb, a web application and REST service.

Architecture

Requirements
OptaPlanner requires Java 11 or later and is 100% pure Java. It easily integrates with other JavaTM technologies. OptaPlanner runs on any Java Virtual Machine, is compatible with all major JVM languages, and is available on all major platforms.

Use OptaPlanner with Maven

Add the following dependency to optaplanner-core in your pom.xml if you use Maven:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.optaplanner</groupId>
<artifactId>optaplanner-core</artifactId>
<version>...</version>
</dependency>

Note: The solverConfig.xml file is no longer required in the updated version of OptaPlanner, and the drl file has been replaced with a Java class in which we implement ConstraintProvider that provides a defined constraint method in which we can define our rules.

Benefits of Constraint Streams
Constraint Streams is a modern full-featured API for writing OptaPlanner constraints, which has a number of advantages over score DRL.

There is no new language that developers need to learn. Java is used in Constraint Streams.

Full IDE support, including syntax coloring and refactoring, is offered by Constraint Streams.

Constraint Streams offers comprehensive unit testing support.

Constraint Streams work considerably better than score DRL in the majority of use cases

As shown in the picture, you can write your constraint like this:

We define constraints in these examples as required skills and no overlapping shifts. If an employee's skill set doesn't include the required skills, we will penalize a hard score. If an employee has overlapping shifts, the hard constraint is dynamically equated to the overlapping minutes in the no-overlapping-shifts constraint.

Closing Thoughts

From a developer’s perspective, the updated versions of OptaPlanner are extremely useful and easy to use. The employee scheduling issue is currently fully implemented in Java and is compatible with any JVM system. This is yet another reason for using updated versions.

We are a 360-degree ERP application development company that excels in building custom enterprise planning solutions using OptaPlanner. Our OptaPlanner application development services cater to the diverse industry-specific needs of clients, helping them boost their productivity and efficiency levels. Contact us at [email protected] for more details.