Configuration profiles and Shift alternatives for ESS (v0.34.0)

We’re very excited to announce this new version of the Timefold Platform, with a major new feature “Configuration Profiles”, and several updates to our models.

This new version of the Timefold Platform comes with these platform improvements:

Configuration Profiles
: We’ve introduced configuration profiles for the Timefold Platform. With these profiles you can create reusable sets of constraint weights, model configuration parameters and run settings. These profiles will make it a lot easier to do goal alignment, or model benchmarking. We’ve written documentation on how you can use configuration profiles to tweak optimization goals, and how to use them for the Field Service Routing and Employee Shift Scheduling models.
Filtering on dates in the Model Runs Overview
: It’s now possible to set specific date ranges when filtering on the Model Runs overview page. This should make it easier to find a specific historic run.
Bug fixes and improvements
: We’ve fixed a bug where we showed certain warning messages in the layout of an error message, and where we showed an irrelevant warning about justifications. We’ve improved the handling of events that sometimes caused the status of a run to be incorrectly displayed. And we’ve upgraded the framework that the Timefold Platform is built on (Quarkus).

Next to that, this new version of the Timefold Platform comes with updates to these Timefold Models:

Employee Shift Scheduling (v1 | Stable)

Shift alternatives
: We’ve added a feature to the model that makes it possible to define a group of shifts and make sure only a specific number of them is assigned. You can use this for instance when you know a certain task needs to be done, but there’s a few options for the shift it should happen in. See New and noteworthy for more information.
Contractual period rules can limit logged time
: The contractual period rules can now specify minimum and maximum logged minutes. This feature can be useful when limiting minimum/maximum shift hours that differ from the scheduled shift start to end interval, e.g. because breaks are not included in the shift working hours. See New and noteworthy for more information.
Documentation updates
: We’ve made sure each of the model’s constraints now has clear descriptions. These descriptions show in the OpenAPI Specs, but also when creating a configuration profile for this model. And we have added a guide that explains metrics and optimizations goals for this model.

Field Service Routing (v1 | Stable)

Technician costs KPI is now optional
: The Technician costs KPI introduced in the previous version (v0.33.0) is now only computed when a cost structure is submitted as part of the planning problem. We also have made some small improvements to the feature guide.
Visualization improvements
: We’ve done some minor bugfixes to the visualization.
Documentation updates
: We’ve made sure each of the model’s constraints now has clear descriptions. These descriptions show in the OpenAPI Specs, but also when creating a configuration profile for this model. And we have added a guide that explains metrics and optimizations goals for this model.

Please let us know if you have feedback.