To OptaPlan or not to OptaPlan: That was my question. And ultimately, the answer came back as (drum roll please)… don’t OptaPlan. The Problem What am I talking about here? I was working on a project where I needed to solve this problem: I needed to be able to generate study schedules for college students. For example, say you’re enrolled in four courses and you need to come up with a study schedule for your homework, exams, term papers etc. for the entire semester, given the constraints of your sleep time, wake time, meal times etc. At first blush, it seemed clear to me that I needed to sit down and write an algorithm for this. However, after speaking to one of my illustrious higher-ups, I found out that this was a solved problem. Enter OptaPlanner. OptaPlanner OptaPlanner is a sophisticated and robust Java library that can be used to…