Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ge0ffrey 17 days ago
I beg to differ. Timefold is used daily in real-world operations.

Neither our clusters in the US or EU can afford to go down for a minute, or business operations in logistics, retail and healthcare are impacted.

> They do not adequately account for traffic, driver preferences, or other factors that require a continuous feedback

- Traffic: supported

- Driver preferences: the APIs support

-- Area affinity (soft) and geo fencing (hard)

-- Fairness and load balancing of work (soft)

-- Overtime (soft and hard)

-- Seniors not doing boring junior tasks (soft)

- Continuous feedback: the APIs support

-- Real-time rescheduling (warm starts) as actual execution data comes in.

-- Recommend assignment: scheduling in survival mode

-- Pinning: user stays in control through overriding assignments

-- Explainability: why a certain decision was made

-- Insights: what are the bottlenecks in my schedule - what type of employees should I hire or upskill.

1 comments

That being said: I fully agree that the solver industry as a whole has focused for far too long on global optima for academic requirements, instead of real-world use for the actual business requirements, and how to deal with business objective changes each quarter.