frePPLe
a Free Production Planning Library

FrePPLe aims at building a lightweight open source framework that easily and quickly delivers a solution for production planning problems. The initial focus is on small to medium sized planning problems for the discrete manufacturing industry.

Production planning software traditionally has been an area with plenty of home-grown, extremely specialised and/or very primitive solutions.
Strangely enough, while creative and innovative open source solutions pop up in all computing areas, production planning software still tends to be a very closed world full of academic, proprietary and expensive solutions. Till now...
FrePPLe is the first open source production planning toolkit for your day-to-day planning problems.

For the developer community, the project is also trying to establish a common ground framework for planning applications. Rather than rebuilding the basic foundation from scratch over and over again, developers can now leverage a proven framework to extend with their own extension modules.
New workflows and functionality can now be built much quicker and easier.

The word "free" in the project name refers to liberty, not price. Think of "freedom of speech" rather than "free beer": see the free software definition.

The software is still young. The functionality and API are enhanced very quickly.
Plenty of feedback is required to move the project forward. So, browse the site, have a look at the software and please mail us your feedback.
While there's plenty of work left, the software is quickly getting into a state where real-life problems can be handled efficiently.


The main features in brief:

FrePPLe has two main components.

  1. The first one is a core library containing the model and the solving algorithms.
    It is generic and can be used in a number of applications.
  2. A second component is a flexible user interface and database layer to support the core library.
    It takes care of the maintenance of input data, reporting of the plan results, and data integration to other systems.

The key features of each component are:

  1. FrePPLe core library

  2. FrePPLe user interface and database layer
    A planning solution consist of much more than the core solver algorithms...
    It includes data maintenance, reporting, data integration to other systems, workflows, job schedules, etc...
    A front-end for the core library is required to meet these requirements with a maximum of flexibility.


How can you contribute?

We need your help: developers, testers, writers, implementers and, most of all, users. No matter which 'er' you happen to be, or how much time you can provide, you can make valuable contributions.

In short, we're just getting started. There's still plenty to do.
All contributors are recognized in the authors list.