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Employee Scheduling

developers.google.com

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Re: Employee Scheduling

#2
I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the problem? Is it easier to use?

Re: Employee Scheduling

#3

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

For the part I have used, it is a common API over various solvers (free and commercial), plus some google own solvers. It is pretty neat, but because of licensing reasons requires you to recompile it yourself to access all the free solvers.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#4

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

Exactly my thinking.

I work in a company that deals exclusively with OR. This means that we might be overly specialized for this product.

I see OR-Tools as an educational product. The tool is easy to start tinkering with and it has superb documentation - even for people not specialized in combinatorial optimization.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#5

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

I'm not either completely sure about what "OR-Tools" really is, I've considered it an API and packaging to different solvers.

I've used the LP solver [0] for real problems (not on a massive scale), but it worked very nice. Basically a scheduling problem where we very quickly could give the user a pretty decent solution as a starting point that they then could customise. Dramatically shortened the time for the user for that process, compared to the previous random/heuristic "solution" we give.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/optimization/lp/glop

Re: Employee Scheduling

#6
I see their documentation also covers routing vehicles across multiple deliveries, with time windows.

Can someone who's tested this stuff out advise on how many deliveries it can handle at a time? The examples only list trivial problems, but that might just be to keep the examples short.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#7

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

[deleted]

Re: Employee Scheduling

#8
Can someone chime in on how this compares with the software that takes part in the yearly planning competition, eg. FastDownward etc. What subset of PDDL is supported?

Re: Employee Scheduling

#9
Happy user here! I've used it for a couple of projects.

Here's an open source solver for a fun presumably-NP casual video game:

https://github.com/asah/tents-and-trees

As with other solvers, it can be a little difficult to debug, so I recommend starting small and adding constraints and known test examples.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#10

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

Exactly my thinking. I work in a company that deals exclusively with OR. This means that we might be overly specialized for this product. I see OR-Tools as an educational product. The tool is easy to start tinkering with and it has superb documentation - even for people not specialized in combinatorial optimization.

What do you work on?
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