We’re proud to announce the rename Drools Planner to OptaPlanner starting with version 6.0.0.Beta1. We’re also happy to unveil its new website: www.optaplanner.org.

OptaPlanner optimizes business resource usage. Every organization faces planning problems: provide products or services with a limited set of constrained resources (employees, assets, time and money). OptaPlanner optimizes such planning to do more business with less resources. Typical use cases include vehicle routing, employee rostering and equipment scheduling.

OptaPlanner is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine written in Java™. It helps normal Java™ programmers solve constraint satisfaction problems efficiently. Under the hood, it combines optimization heuristics and metaheuristics with very efficient score calculation.

For more information, visit the new website:
  http://www.optaplanner.org

Why change the name?

OptaPlanner is the new name for Drools Planner. OptaPlanner is now standalone, but can still be optionally combined with the Drools rule engine for a powerful declarative approach to planning optimization.

• OptaPlanner has graduated from the Drools project to become a top-level JBoss Community project.

• OptaPlanner is not a fork of Drools Planner. We simply renamed it.

• OptaPlanner (the planning engine) joins its siblings Drools (the rule engine) and jBPM (the workflow engine) in the KIE group.

• Our commitment to Drools hasn't changed.

• The efficient Drools rule engine is still the recommended way to do score calculation.

• Alternative score calculation options, such as pure Java calculation (no Drools), also remain fully supported.

How will this affect your business?

From a business point of view, there's little or no change:

• The mission remains unchanged:

• We're still 100% committed to put business resource optimization in the hands of normal Java developers.

• The license remains unchanged (Apache Software License 2.0). It's still the same open source license.

• The release lifecycle remains unchanged: OptaPlanner is still released at the same time as Drools and jBPM.

• Red Hat is considering support subscription offerings for OptaPlanner as part of its BRMS and BPM platforms.

• A Tech Preview of OptaPlanner is targeted for BRMS 6.0.

What has changed?

• The website has changed to http://www.optaplanner.org

• The distributions artifacts have changed name:

• Jar names changes:

• drools-planner-core-*.jar is now optaplanner-core-*.jar

• drools-planner-benchmark-*.jar is now optaplanner-benchmark-*.jar

• Maven identification groupId's and artifactId's changes:

• groupId org.drools.planner is now org.optaplanner

• artifactId drools-planner-core is now optaplanner-core

• artifactId drools-planner-benchmark is now optaplanner-benchmark

• As usual, for more information see the Upgrade Recipe in the download zip.

• The API's namespace has changed. As usual, see the upgrade recipe on how to deal with this efficiently.

• Starting from 6.1.0.Final, OptaPlanner will have a 100% backwards compatible API.

• OptaPlanner gets its own IRC channels on Freenode: #optaplanner and #optaplanner-dev