OR-Tools is a set of solver:
- A very popular
Routing Library
built on top of a traditional constraint programming solver
- An award winning
CP-SAT
solver that combines Constraint Programming techniques, SAT solver search and Boolean centric approach, MIP solver techniques like cuts and linear relaxation, and Large Neighborhood search
- A Simplex solver:
GLOP
- A Boolean linear solver (
BOP
) geared towards finding good solutions fast
- A
Linear solver interface
that offers a unified API for GLOP, BOP, and third_party solvers like Coin OR, SCIP, CPLEX, Gurobi, and XPRESS MP.
- Graph and Flow algorithms
OR-Tools is implemented in C++ and offers interfaces in Python, Java, and .NET.
As you can see, Linear and MIP solver are just one tool among many.
Now, to answer you questions, the goal of OR-Tools is to interact with the scientific community and the OR community. This being said, we are very pleased to see a large community of commercial users relying on it for their business, and we do our best to support them.
These tools are just what we use internally to optimize Google.