Timefold Solver Community Edition 1.8.0

Spring is in the air, and so is another release of Timefold Solver. And this time, it's a big one! For the Community Edition, we have prepared the following features:

• List variables now allow for unassigned values. Say goodbye to the "dummy vehicle" pattern, say hello to the performance improvements that come from it!
• Spring Boot users among you can now easily generate native images, as was already possible for Quarkus.
• ConstraintVerifier can now test for justifications and indictments, allowing you to write tests that will give you even more confidence in your constraints than was possible before.
• We have exposed new metrics that allow you to better monitor the currently running solver(s).
• We have brought the usual bugfixes and dependency upgrades.

On top of all that, our Enterprise Edition customers can enjoy some exclusive goodies:

• Automatic node sharing. Use cases with a large number of complex constraints may run much faster without any changes to your code. In our benchmarks, we have seen improvements in score calculation speed of up to 100 % on some data sets.
• Nearby Selection can now be enabled with a single switch in your configuration, as opposed to the cumbersome configuration of old. If you're still not using Nearby Selection for your large routing problems, you're missing out on cost savings coming from significantly improved solutions!

Going forward, we will be publishing an Upgrade Recipe to let you know of any things you may or may not run into when upgrading to the latest version of Timefold Solver. It's a good read!

Changelog

🚀 Features

• a0ce0e2 Support unassigned elements for list variables, closes #573
• 8462888 Add support for Spring Boot native image, closes #609
• 53f83bd Automatic node sharing for ConstraintProvider, closes #685
• 31f66ad Add the nearby-distance-meter-class property for Quarkus and Spring, closes #687
• 3211f8c Enable Nearby Selection for non-empty move selectors configuration, closes #684
• 55c373b Add Nearby configuration by exception, closes #673
• fb946aa Support getting score calculation count and speed for SolverJob, closes #621
• 388490b Expose entity, variable and value counts in the logs and metrics, closes #671
• 14b7b68 Add penalty methods for long and BigDecimal values without match weighter, closes #656
• 82a9a68 Extend SingleConstraintAssertion to check Justification/indictment, closes #659
• d2e24d2 Add withClassLoader(...) method to SolverConfig, closes #691 #695

🐛 Fixes

• b8fdd8d Do not recalculate problem size statistics in Benchmarker
• 6916ba7 Pass provided ClassLoader to ServiceLoader, closes #690 #692

🧰 Tasks

• 307630c Improve error messages from loading YAML files, closes #637

📝 Documentation

• 207e122 Add upgrade and migration section, closes #686

Contributors

We'd like to thank the following people for their contributions:

• Christopher Chianelli
• Frederico Gonçalves (@zepfred)
• Geoffrey De Smet
• GitHub
• Lukáš Petrovický (@triceo)
• Pieter De Schepper
• dependabot[bot] (@dependabot[bot])
• marinier

Timefold Solver Community Edition is an open source project, and you are more than welcome to contribute as well!
For more, see Contributing.

Should your business need to scale to truly massive data sets or require enterprise-grade support,
check out Timefold Solver Enterprise Edition.

How to use Timefold Solver

To see Timefold Solver in action, check out the quickstarts.

With Maven or Gradle, add the ai.timefold.solver : timefold-solver-core : 1.8.0 dependency in your pom.xml to get started.

You can also import the Timefold Solver Bom (ai.timefold.solver : timefold-solver-bom : 1.8.0)
to avoid duplicating version numbers when adding other Timefold Solver dependencies later on.

Additional notes

The changelog and the list of contributors above are automatically generated.
It excludes contributions to certain areas of the repository, such as CI and build automation.
This is done for the sake of brevity and to make the user-facing changes stand out more.