Acezd Planner
Every organization faces planning problems: providing products or services with a limited set of constrained resources (employees, assets, time and money). Acezd Planner optimizes such planning to do more business with less resources. This is known as Constraint Satisfaction Programming (which is part of the Operations Research discipline). Acezd Planner is a lightweight, embeddable constraint satisfaction engine which optimizes planning problems. It solves use cases such as:
- Employee shift rostering: timetabling nurses, repairmen, etc.
- Agenda scheduling: scheduling meetings, appointments, maintenance jobs, advertisements, etc.
- Educational timetabling: scheduling lessons, courses, exams, conference presentations, etc.
- Vehicle routing: planning vehicle routes (trucks, trains, boats, airplanes, etc.) for moving freight and/or passengers through multiple destinations using known mapping tools.
- Bin packing: filling containers, trucks, ships, and storage warehouses with items, but also packing information across computer resources, as in cloud computing.
- Job shop scheduling: planning car assembly lines, machine queue planning, workforce task planning, etc.
- Cutting stock: minimizing waste while cutting paper, steel, carpet, etc.
- Sport scheduling: planning games and training schedules for football leagues, baseball leagues, etc.
- Financial optimization: investment portfolio optimization, risk spreading, etc.
What do we help solve
A planning problem has an optimal goal, based on limited resources and under specific constraints. Optimal goals can be any number of things, such as:
- Maximized profits - the optimal goal results in the highest possible profit.
- Minimized ecological footprint - the optimal goal has the least amount of environmental impact.
- Maximized satisfaction for employees or customers - the optimal goal prioritizes the needs of employees or customers.
The ability to achieve these goals relies on the number of resources available, such as:
- The number of people.
- Amount of time.
- Budget.
- Physical assets, for example, machinery, vehicles, computers, buildings, etc.
Specific constraints related to these resources must also be taken into account, such as the number of hours a person works, their ability to use certain machines, or compatibility between pieces of equipment.
Acezd Planner helps solve constraint satisfaction problems efficiently. Under the hood, it combines optimization heuristics and meta-heuristics with very efficient score calculation.
Example Scenarios (Use Cases)
Machine reassignment (limited resource assignment problem)
Vehicle Routing Problem
Using a fleet of vehicles, pick up the objects of each customer and bring them to the depot. Each vehicle can service multiple customers, but it has a limited capacity.
Facility Location problem
Pick the best geographical locations for new stores, distribution centers, covid test centers or telco masts.
Project job scheduling
Schedule all jobs in time and execution mode to minimize project delays. Each job is part of a project. A job can be executed in different ways: each way is an execution mode that implies a different duration but also different resource usages. This is a form of flexible job shop scheduling.
Hospital bed planning (PAS - Patient Admission Scheduling)
Assign each patient (that will come to the hospital) into a bed for each night that the patient will stay in the hospital. Each bed belongs to a room and each room belongs to a department. The arrival and departure dates of the patients is fixed: only a bed needs to be assigned for each night.
Task Assigning
Assign each task to a spot in an employee’s queue. Each task has a duration which is affected by the employee’s affinity level with the task’s customer.
Exam timetabling
Schedule each exam into a period and into a room. Multiple exams can share the same room during the same period.
School Timetabling problem
Assign lessons to timeslots and rooms to produce a better schedule for teachers and students.
Project job scheduling
Schedule all jobs in time and execution mode to minimize project delays. Each job is part of a project. A job can be executed in different ways: each way is an execution mode that implies a different duration but also different resource usages. This is a form of flexible job shop scheduling.
Hospital bed planning (PAS - Patient Admission Scheduling)
Assign each patient (that will come to the hospital) into a bed for each night that the patient will stay in the hospital. Each bed belongs to a room and each room belongs to a department. The arrival and departure dates of the patients is fixed: only a bed needs to be assigned for each night.
Task Assigning
Assign each task to a spot in an employee’s queue. Each task has a duration which is affected by the employee’s affinity level with the task’s customer.
Exam timetabling
Schedule each exam into a period and into a room. Multiple exams can share the same room during the same period.
School Timetabling problem
Assign lessons to timeslots and rooms to produce a better schedule for teachers and students.
Nurse rostering
Traveling tournament problem (TTP)
Call Centre Real Time Scheduling problem
Schedule incoming calls to employees matching skills and availability.
Maintenance Scheduling problem
Schedule maintenance jobs to crews over time to reduce both premature and overdue maintenance.
