mlawrenson

They have a strong OR team who has been building an excellent open source solver (OR-tools) for more than a decade. It makes sense to start trying to commercialise this work. It's interesting seeing them do it through problem specific APIs though.

This is actually the exact problem I want to solve. I hear the same thing from almost everyone I've met who makes schedules. Having an OR background, I always find it insane, their problems sound straightforward to model and solve with normal solvers and no fancy techniques - and they also always sound high value. I think the problem is that OR broadly just isn't accessible.

Most well supported solvers use a mathematical paradigm to define your problems, which "normal" people would look at and immediately get overwhelmed. There are nice off-the-shelf solutions for common scheduling problems, but unless you used it from the start, every business has some unique wrinkles which make fully adopting one of those solutions too hard. Either your wrinkle is not supported, or you cannot figure out how to wedge it into the tools provided. If you're really inclined to try to solve your scheduling problems better, the courses you'll find usually assume significant prior programming and/or mathematical knowledge.

I think it should be possible to lean on no-code paradigms to build a modelling environment for scheduling problems that is accessible for "normal" people who need more than Excel but can't hire an OR specialist.