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

1. Download the Drools Planner zip. Downloading any of the other zips such as Drools itself or the Eclipse Drools plugin tools is optional. The Drools Planner zip comes with everything most people need.
2. From the zip, open examples/runExamples.sh or .bat and in the GUI play with the cloud balancing and curriculum course scheduling problem.
3. Read the Quick Start tutorial in the manual.
4. Take a look at the source code of curriculum course scheduling in the zip under examples/sources/ and run it in your favorite IDE.