J-Fall 2021: Geoffrey De Smet – Artificial Intelligence on Quarkus: I love it when an OptaPlan comes together

Forget about Machine Learning. Planning optimization is the most profitable AI technology on this planet. The world is full of planning challenges, such as vehicle routing problems, maintenance scheduling and employee rostering. Find the quickest routes to visit n locations with k vehicles. Or assign shifts to employees, taking into account skills and availability. Few people realize how much AI algorithms improve those solutions. For example, when telco’s started using OptaPlanner to plan their fleet of technicians, many expected a driving time reduction of 1-2%. It was 25%. In some cases, that saves hundreds of millions of dollars and millions of kilograms of CO² emissions, every year. In this session I’ll show you how to code a highschool timetabling application, with Quarkus and OptaPlanner. It ‘ll generate the perfect lesson schedule, for both students and teachers, taking into account hard and soft constraints.