Intro & scope
Use cases where a mathematical optimiser (LP/MIP/CP-SAT, metaheuristics, RL policies) computes a best feasible decision under constraints; ML (forecasts, learned costs) feeds it and an LLM at most wraps it (modelling copilot, explanations). Patterns: OPT.LOGISTICS (routing, inventory, packing, network), OPT.SCHEDULE (production, workforce, timetables, dispatch), OPT.RESOURCE (energy, pricing, portfolio, allocation), OPT.PROCESS (plant/process parameters, control).
Scope boundaries: pure forecasting belongs to PRED (OPT consumes its output); anomaly alerting to ANOM; LLM-only agents to AGENT. Overlaps: OPT-001/019/028 (routing vs technician dispatch vs ridepooling: vehicle routing with fixed fleet vs skill/appointment-driven vs real-time on-demand), OPT-011/021/032/022/039 (battery, EV depot, home, grid operator, trading: same dispatch core, different asset owner and market role), OPT-009/038/024 (parameter tuning offline vs closed-loop control vs water-specific), OPT-003/035 (shift planning vs contact-centre routing; both employee-affecting, AI Act 'depends' via Annex III employment when worker allocation/monitoring is automated). Safety-critical OPT-029 is high-risk (emergency dispatch, Annex III 5(d)).
AI Act reasoning (common): minimal when decisions concern assets/goods; 'depends' when tasks/shifts are allocated to workers, or the system is a safety component of critical infrastructure (energy, water, traffic, Annex III 2); high where emergency services are triaged.
Use cases
| ID | Title | Pattern | Maturity | Path | HW tier | AI Act risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OPT-001 | Vehicle routing & tour optimisation | OPT.LOGISTICS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-002 | Production scheduling & advanced planning (APS) | OPT.SCHEDULE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-003 | Workforce scheduling & shift planning | OPT.SCHEDULE | mainstream | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-004 | Dynamic pricing & revenue management | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-005 | Inventory optimisation & automated replenishment | OPT.LOGISTICS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-006 | Warehouse slotting & picking optimisation | OPT.LOGISTICS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-007 | Building energy management & HVAC optimisation | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-008 | Supply chain network design & S&OP planning | OPT.LOGISTICS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-009 | Manufacturing process parameter optimisation | OPT.PROCESS | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-010 | Portfolio optimisation & algorithmic trading | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-011 | Battery storage dispatch & grid flexibility optimisation | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-012 | Load, container & cutting optimisation (packing/nesting) | OPT.LOGISTICS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-013 | Timetabling (schools, universities, public transport) | OPT.SCHEDULE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-014 | Precision farming: irrigation & fertilisation optimisation | OPT.PROCESS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-015 | Cloud cost & compute resource optimisation (FinOps) | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-016 | Trade promotion optimisation & promotion uplift planning (CPG / retail) | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-017 | Assortment planning & store space optimisation | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-018 | Natural-language optimisation modelling & decision copilot | OPT.PROCESS | early-adopter | B | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-019 | Field service scheduling & technician dispatch optimisation | OPT.SCHEDULE | mainstream | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-020 | Disruption management & operations recovery (airlines, rail, public transport) | OPT.SCHEDULE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-021 | EV fleet & depot smart-charging optimisation | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-022 | Distribution grid congestion management & redispatch optimisation (DSO/TSO) | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-023 | District heating & CHP dispatch optimisation | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-024 | Water & wastewater treatment optimisation (aeration, dosing, pump scheduling) | OPT.PROCESS | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-025 | Adaptive traffic signal control | OPT.SCHEDULE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-026 | Voyage & flight trajectory optimisation (weather routing, fuel, emissions, contrails) | OPT.LOGISTICS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-027 | Construction & capital project schedule optimisation and delay-risk forecasting | OPT.SCHEDULE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-028 | On-demand ridepooling & demand-responsive transport dispatch | OPT.LOGISTICS | early-adopter | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-029 | Emergency services resource deployment (ambulance dispatch, relocation & station planning) | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | B | HW1 | high |
| OPT-030 | Mobile network (RAN) optimisation & energy saving | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-031 | Recipe, blend & formulation optimisation (feed, food, concrete, fuels) | OPT.PROCESS | mainstream | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-032 | Home energy management for prosumers (PV, battery, heat pump, EV charging on dynamic tariffs) | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | minimal |
| OPT-033 | Digital freight matching & spot-rate brokerage automation | OPT.LOGISTICS | early-adopter | A | HW2 | minimal |
| OPT-034 | Sales territory design, account assignment & quota setting | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-035 | Predictive customer-to-agent routing in contact centres | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-036 | Fibre (FTTH) & utility network rollout planning and design automation | OPT.RESOURCE | early-adopter | A | HW2 | minimal |
| OPT-037 | Container terminal & port operations optimisation (berth, quay crane, yard stacking, truck slots) | OPT.LOGISTICS | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-038 | Closed-loop AI process control & real-time optimisation for continuous plants | OPT.PROCESS | early-adopter | A | HW1 | depends |
| OPT-039 | Renewable portfolio marketing & algorithmic power trading | OPT.RESOURCE | mainstream | A | HW1 | depends |
Shared stack
Common core (all tiers): solver layer (OR-Tools CP-SAT/routing, HiGHS, optionally Gurobi/CPLEX/Timefold), Pyomo/PuLP or linopy modelling, Postgres/TimescaleDB for data and results, Python orchestration (Dagster/Airflow/Prefect), LightGBM/Prophet/statsforecast for the predictive inputs, MLflow for model registry, a what-if UI (Streamlit/Superset), human approval step with audit log. EU-hosted (or on-prem) data; no personal data leaves the EU.
HW1 (CPU only, 8-32 cores, 32-128 GB RAM, one VM or small k8s node; nearly all OPT cases): the core above plus Valhalla/OSRM for road matrices, Ray/Optuna for parallel search, Stable-Baselines3 on CPU for small RL policies, SimPy/Mesa for simulation, MQTT/Kafka + Redis for near-real-time telemetry (energy, traffic, RAN). Shared by OPT-001/005/006/012/019/028 (routing + geodata), OPT-007/011/021/022/023/032/039 (energy: forecasts + MILP dispatch + MQTT/OpenADR/IEC 61850 gateways), OPT-009/024/038 (OPC UA historian + soft-sensor + MPC/RL).
HW2 (single GPU 24-48 GB, e.g. L40S/A6000): add a self-hosted open-weight LLM (Mistral/Llama/Qwen 7-32B via vLLM) for NL modelling copilot (OPT-018), document/voice intake (OPT-033), plus segmentation/vision pipelines (OPT-036); GPU RL training for large simulators.
HW3 (multi-GPU node): only for large foundation-model fine-tuning or massive RL training; not required by any OPT case today.
Cross-family reuse: forecasting inputs from PRED (same TimescaleDB + MLflow), anomaly gates from ANOM, document extraction from DOC, agent frameworks from AGENT (OPT-018 copilot generates solver code, executes in sandbox, and the solver stays the decision authority).