Open Planner Studio v2026.7.3

What's New in v2026.7.3

This release delivers phase 2.5: resources — full resource management, workload analysis and automatic resource levelling — plus rebuilt example projects, an in-app recovery dialog and a hardening round driven by three independent critical reviews.

Resources (phase 2.5)

• Five resource types: labour (people), equipment (cranes, machinery, scaffolding), materials (concrete, steel, timber), subcontractors and crews — crews can group other resources into a hierarchy. Each resource has a daily capacity, a unit of measure and an hourly rate.
• Resource calendars and time-phased capacity: give a resource its own working calendar, and let its availability change over time (e.g. three carpenters until week 10, five after) with effective-dated capacity steps.
• Assignments with distribution curves: assign resources to tasks in units per day, spread over the task duration with six curves (uniform, front-loaded, back-loaded, bell, early peak, late peak). Assignments are only allowed on workable (leaf) tasks — never on milestones or summary rows, the classic histogram polluter in other packages.
• Workload & overallocation engine: every calculation sums the daily load per resource against its capacity; overallocation is flagged in the ribbon and drawn in red.
• Resource histogram under the Gantt chart, sharing its timescale: capacity line (stepped when capacity changes over time), red peaks above the line, a resource picker with overallocation badges, click-through to the tasks causing a peak, and a resizable, persistent height. The histogram updates immediately on every resource or assignment change; date-affecting edits show an explicit "out of date — recalculate (F5)" hint instead of silently stale bars.
• Automatic resource levelling and smoothing: a serial placement algorithm resolves overallocations by shifting tasks, ordered by priority, float and start date. The dialog previews every shift before you commit — including successors without resources — with an explicit before/after project end date, and explains any conflict it cannot resolve (calendar mismatch, insufficient capacity, or a peak demand that exceeds capacity outright). Smoothing mode keeps the project end date fixed. One undo step reverts an applied levelling completely, and float is honestly recalculated after levelling — no "phantom float".
• Task priority (0–1000; 1000 = never level) steers who wins when capacity is scarce.
• Everything round-trips through the native IFC 4.3 format (including IfcCrewResource, per-resource work calendars and task priority) and through Primavera P6 XML and MS Project MSPDI — resources, assignments, curves, calendars and rates travel along. Files without resources stay byte-identical.

Example projects

• New Examples section in the File menu: open a bundled example with one click.
• Three showcase schedules — a housing block, a cycling tunnel and a quay renovation — that together exercise every feature of the app: all relation types with lags and leads, date constraints with a deliberate negative-float conflict, mandatory milestones and inspection points, all five resource types with crew hierarchy and resource calendars, distribution curves, solvable overallocations, pinned tasks and holiday effects. They double as interactive documentation.
• The twenty simpler examples were regenerated with realistic phase overlap (a real critical path instead of everything critical) and year-independent dates, using a rebuilt generator that runs the real scheduling engine — example files can no longer drift from the app.

Improvements

• In-app recovery dialog: after an unexpected shutdown the restore question is now a proper dialog showing each recoverable document with its name, file path, task count and snapshot time — instead of a bare native yes/no box. Pressing Escape postpones the decision safely.
• Assignment input is validated (no zero/negative units), the ribbon assign button now sets units and curve in one go, resources with assignments ask for confirmation before deletion, and the resource table shows a live cost total per resource when a rate is filled in.
• The histogram scales to what is visible on screen, so normal weeks are no longer flattened by a distant peak.

Fixed

• Collapsing a summary task moved its subtasks to the bottom of the list instead of hiding them — in both the Gantt chart and the task table.
• P6 exchange used the wrong units convention: units were written as hours/day where Primavera expects fractions (1.0 = 100%), so a full-time resource would have imported as 800%. Hourly rates are now exported too.
• Two assignments of the same resource on one task no longer corrupt on save/reload.
• The task entity in written IFC files is now fully spec-conform (attribute layout per IFC 4.3); older files remain readable.
• The parent-task field was removed from the edit dialog — it silently did nothing there; changing structure is done with indent/outdent.

Quality

• Scheduling regression suite grown from 202 to 240 hand-computed cases (all green), now covering resource loading, curve distribution, levelling, smoothing, resource calendars, pinned tasks and preview honesty.
• The whole phase was audited by three independent critical reviews (code, product and scheduling-chain) and every confirmed finding in this release is covered by a regression test.
• All new UI text translated in 14 languages.

Downloads

• Windows: Download the .exe setup file
• macOS: Download the .dmg file (universal - supports Intel and Apple Silicon)
• Linux: Download the .deb package, .AppImage or .snap

Existing installations update automatically via the in-app updater.