The competence is needed to meet strategic goals of higher efficiency and service levels in the health sector, and to facilitate innovation in the tool vendor industry. We shall focus on two specific, highly challenging, important planning tasks: personnel rostering and surgery scheduling. Optimization methods will be incrementally developed and assessed via prototypes. A generic optimization library and implementation guide will ensure wide dissemination and exploitation of the methodology, also outside of the health sector. The industrial partners of the project are Gatsoft AS and DIPS ASA.