Upgrade from OptaPlanner

In spring of 2024, Red Hat announced end of life for OptaPlanner. Timefold Solver is a faster, feature-rich, and actively developed fork of OptaPlanner by the same team.

1. Automatic upgrade

Upgrading from OptaPlanner to Timefold Solver only takes two minutes. Run the command below to upgrade your java, build and other code automatically.

The script below upgrades your OptaPlanner project to the latest Timefold Solver version, which is SNAPSHOT. This is a significant jump and might require additional migrations. Check out our other guide for more details on how to upgrade to the 2.x range.

  • Maven

  • Gradle

mvn org.openrewrite.maven:rewrite-maven-plugin:6.28.1:run -Drewrite.recipeArtifactCoordinates=ai.timefold.solver:timefold-solver-migration:SNAPSHOT -Drewrite.activeRecipes=ai.timefold.solver.migration.ToLatest
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TimefoldAI/timefold-solver/refs/tags/vSNAPSHOT/tools/migration/upgrade-timefold.gradle > upgrade-timefold.gradle ; gradle -Dorg.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2G --init-script upgrade-timefold.gradle rewriteRun -DtimefoldSolverVersion=SNAPSHOT ; rm upgrade-timefold.gradle

Our automatic migrations will not change the version of your frameworks. If you run into compatibility issues, please consult the integration guides for Spring or Quarkus.

Having done that, do a test run of the solver and commit the changes. If it doesn’t work, just revert it instead and submit an issue. We’ll fix it with the highest priority.

Timefold Solver 1.x does not support scoreDRL, nor is it upgraded automatically. If you’re still using scoreDRL from OptaPlanner 7.x, please upgrade to Constraint Streams first.

2. Manual upgrade

Timefold Solver 1.x is backward compatible with OptaPlanner 8.x, except for the following changes:

  • Java 17 is the minimum, and Java 21 and 25 are also supported.

  • The Maven/Gradle GAVs changed:

    • The groupId changed from org.optaplanner to ai.timefold.solver.

    • The artifactIds changed from optaplanner-* to timefold-solver-*.

    • ArtifactIds containing persistence- changed from optaplanner-persistence-* to timefold-solver-*.

      • For example, optaplanner-persistence-jackson changed to timefold-solver-jackson.

  • The import statements changed accordingly:

    • import org.optaplanner…​; changed to import ai.timefold.solver…​;.

    • import org.optaplanner.persistence…​; changed to import ai.timefold.solver…​; too.

  • The JEE dependencies changed from javax to jakarta to accommodate Spring 3 and Quarkus 3.

    • This is the same difference as between OptaPlanner 8.x and OptaPlanner 9.x.

  • The OptaPlannerJacksonModule class is now called TimefoldJacksonModule.

  • The deprecated scoreDRL support is removed, because Drools with its transitive dependencies have been removed entirely.

  • The unsecure module persistence-xstream is removed, because of old, unresolved CVEs in XStream.

  • The deprecated, undocumented ScoreHibernateType has been removed because of Jakarta. Use JPA’s ScoreConverter instead.