How do I use Drools Planner?

Question

I have a scheduling problem where each student expresses his preferences for a lecture and a course timetable is generated for all of the students at the same time (in a batch mode if I may).

From what I read around and understand, Drools Planner is very well suited to solve this type of problem. I installed Drools and GEF into my Eclipse IDE. Everything loads just fine. Unfortunately, I can not figure out how to build a simple project.

I looked online for references and found Drools Planner examples, which look and work great. However, I did not find any good tutorial that walks people through the simple cases, besides some code snippets.

How do I model a matching/scheduling problem, where 3 students with unique time and course preferences are looking to sign up for 4 courses? How do I start the code, where do I put the constraints, which classes I call upon, etc?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Drools Planner serves the normal JavaTM programmers to solve planning problems efficiently. In short, it combines optimization heuristics and metaheuristics with very efficient score calculation.

Drools Planner, similar to the rest of Drools, is business-friendly open source software under the Apache Software License 2.0 (layman's explanation). It is 100% pure JavaTM and runs on any JVM.

For the tutorial of the Drools Planner, refer the following link:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301559631_Solving_Planning_Problems_with_Drools_Planner_-_A_Tutorial

If you want to learn about Java then visit this Java Tutorial.