The only constant is change: How PlanningAI keeps schedules alive in real-time
By Tom Cools - DevRel at Timefold
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of great conversations with developers, planners, and other professionals at various conferences. Usually, they’re pretty impressed by what PlanningAI (and Operations Research in general) can do and has been doing for decades. However, there is one particular question which always bubbles up: “What if something happens and the plan no longer works?” Excellent question!
One of my teachers at university imprinted the following quote into my brain: “Change is the only constant” which is a quote often attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who figured it out way back around 500 BC.
Yes, dealing with change has been ruining carefully crafted plans since humans first tried organizing anything.
In the realm of planning and optimization, change can present itself in different ways: An employee calls in sick, a truck decides it's a good time to break down, or a customer ghosts their appointment. Suddenly that beautifully optimized solution becomes irrelevant, sometimes before you’ve even finished your morning coffee. We are forced to face reality: the real world doesn’t care about our perfectly optimized schedules.
Or as another philosopher and occasional boxer put it: “Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth” - Mike Tyson
The quote “change is the only constant” isn’t just a sad pointing out of facts. It basically calls upon us to stay flexible in our plans and adapt to new circumstances, because change will come.
That sounds nice doesn’t it… “just adapt to change”. It’s a bit more involved than that.
Timefold CTO Geoffrey De Smet interviewed OptaZen CEO Simon Tiffert on how they've been optimizing complex planning problems together.
Parcel delivery and pickup, warehouse intralogistics, production scheduling, workforce rostering: Simon has tackled them all. In this short interview, he explains the practical steps he uses to turn messy data into plans that run every day. Give it a watch and pick up ideas for your own optimization projects.
Talk: LLMs can't optimize schedules, but AI can!
By Tom Cools - DevRel at Timefold
Last week, Tom was invited by vJUG to give an online session on how AI-powered optimization algorithms shine where LLMs go off the rails. Definitely worth a watch!
The technical depth of the Vehicle Routing Problem
By Geoffrey De Smet
Most publications on the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) only cover the tip of the iceberg in reality.
Benchmarks and academic papers typically only handle: - Vehicle capacity (CVRP) - Time windows (VRPTW)
But production deployments also deal with skill requirements, multi-day schedules, shift hours, overtime, lunch breaks, task dependencies, contractor costs, priority visits, workload fairness, multi-resource visits...
And last but not least:
Real-time rescheduling.
Because a schedule is never finished, it is a living, breathing thing, that needs updating during the day.
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