You should take a look at Drools Planner, which is designed to provide a framework for solving NP-hard problems using local search. I don't know how "user-friendly" you would consider it to be and there's no GUI, but it sounds like it may be a good fit for you.

From: rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org [rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Andrei Neboian [andrei.neboian@googlemail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2011 5:03 PM
To: rules-users@lists.jboss.org
Subject: [rules-users] Using Drools to model and solve a production scheduling problem with changeovers

Dear All,

I am looking for a user-friendly platform which would allow me to model and solve a
production scheduling problem with changeover times. Since it's an NP-Hard
problem, I am getting convinced that a CP formulation would be most
appropriate. Later on, a GUI should be designed to allow a user to interact
with the model.

Is "drools" a proper platform for this? Are there any examples of this type of problem solved with Drools?

I need to tackle a problem with 4 parallel machines, over 100 jobs and 100 changeovertypes (sequence dependant setup times between each job).

I would appreciate any help on this! Thanks

Kind Regards,
Andrei