TimeFold's heuristics-based approach makes fast solutions to even highly-complex scenarios within the reach of anyone who can write Java or Python expressions that evaluate to true when constraints are satisfied.
Anyways, I wish the best for Timefold team, hopefully they can find success independently. With all the money sloshing around for all sorts of dumb AI projects, I think Timefold definitely deserves a portion too.
> All OptaPlanner features are part of Community Edition, except for Multithreaded Solving
Of course, because why not. If you can take features away from an existing thing to make more money.
I 'd love to understand this better, so we can improve it in Timefold Community. To help deal with new problems, we're creating out-of-the-box quickstarts for common use cases: https://github.com/TimefoldAI/timefold-quickstarts
As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)
Geoffrey (Timefold co-founder / OptaPlanner creator)
> As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)
Yeah, I don’t begrudge you that. It’s just that when I see that multithreading is locked away I just know that the moment I start using the product I’ll find out my toy problems are enterprise scale. Sort of like murpheys law, but for software features.
I've never worked with any of these, but that's what I would expect as well. API documentation that describes how to solve each kind of mathematical optimization problem.
Do you have an example of an optimization solver with API documentation for business SMEs?
m.addConstr(x+y<=limit);
Where m is a model object, x & y are decision variables and limit is a constant.
The above is a no brainer for any business expert. Some solvers are a LOT more low level though and you have to think of the problem in matrix form and specify row/column stuff and it's a lot more involved and assumes significantly more knowledge of the user than the former.
It would cost less to pay Timefold whatever price they quote.
We're still figuring out a good, clear, honest pricing model for Enterprise that works well across company sizes (small - big), industries (healthcare vs telecom vs ...) and usage frequency (strategic vs operational planning).
We're happy to send you our pricing table version 1 (use contact us form on Timefold website), but we need your feedback if it fits your business model, deployment model, usage model, etc to validate our pricing model.