This page belongs to the full documentation. You don't need it to
plan: back to the essentials.
PowerSolver documentation
Version: PowerSolver 2.0 — engine on Timefold Solver 2.0 (Java 21, Spring Boot 4), planning wizard in 5 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch).
PowerSolver makes plans: for each item to plan (a lesson, an operation, a shift position, a job…) it decides one to four things (who, when, where, with whom) or the order of items on a resource (a route), under must-follow rules and wishes. A plan is described by one Excel workbook or one JSON problem file; the wizard checks the data before planning (Can this work?), makes the plan, explains what to fix, and compares successive plans.
Decisions are of kind basic (choose a value: resource or time) or list (order the items on a resource). The type only changes the wizard's form fields; the engine and the 19 rules are the same for all.
Scores
0hard / -1250soft
│ └── wishes: penalties, lower magnitude = better
└────────── must-follow rules broken: must be 0 for a usable plan
A plan with 0hard is valid. The Results page shows each rule's count of violations and says, in plain words, what to fix and where.
Support
Documentation: this folder. The HTML version (html/) is generated from these Markdown files: python -I documentation/tools/build_html.py (never edit the HTML by hand; --check reports pages out of date).