solution family
Planning: timetables, rosters and workshops
Planning well means measuring the distance between the plan you use and the best possible plan, and closing it with mathematical guarantees: not "a timetable that works", but one you can prove how far it is from perfect.
It works the same for staff rosters, timetables, delivery routes or workshop sequences. The vocabulary changes, the problem does not. And in all four we deliver the same thing: how perfect your plan can get, how far from it you are, and the certificate that it cannot be improved when that is the case.
Where to see it working
nurse rostering · in Spanish
A hospital roster one point away from provable perfection
The best known result drops from 7,081 to 7,080, verified and published by the archive that maintains it. Below 7,079 it is proven that no valid roster exists.
school timetabling
A real school's timetable, solved with a free optimizer
Certified optimum in 8 of the 12 schools examined, matching in all of them the best published solution and proving it unbeatable.
How is an optimisation engine different from an HR suite?
| Question | HR suite (clock-in, payroll, rosters) | Optimisation engine |
|---|---|---|
| What is it for? | Recording and administering: clock-ins, absences, publishing rosters, collective agreements. | Deciding the roster: building it, measuring how far from the optimum it is and replanning when something breaks. |
| What does it answer? | "Who clocked in, and when?" | "Is this the best possible roster, and if not, how far off is it?" |
| How is it verified? | Internal reports from the tool itself. | Against public collections with an independent maintainer who validates and lists every result. |
| When do you need each one? | Always: it is the daily administration of your staff. | When the roster itself costs money: coverage, overtime, rest periods, last-minute sick leave. |
They do not compete. A suite administers the roster that exists, and an engine decides which one should exist.
Check it
The MER instance and the list of best known solutions are published at schedulingbenchmarks.org, which is not ours. The full roster and the transcript of the verification are deposited with a DOI at Zenodo.
For school timetabling the work is in the school timetabling demo. And the rest of the catalogue, in the published demos.