Team Formation using Drools Planner

Question

Advice on whether it would be possible to implement this is Drools Planner:

The problem involves team formation. Strong constraints: Students must be placed in N groups Each group must contain X group members Weak Constraints (possible ordered or weighted): Each group must have a member that has a Maths score > Y Each group must consist of members all with the same interest (weak constraints may need to be added at runtime)

Answer 1

Yes, it looks a lot like the Manners2009 example, which is about assign each seat (= group spot) of each table (= group) to a guest (= student) and make sure that each table (= group) has at least 1 democrat (= student with Maths score > Y). Then just add a soft constraint for the same interest rule.

The Manners2009 example isn't up to date with the us of generic move factories in 5.4.0.Final (it will be in 5.5.0.Beta1) and uses a SimpleScore instead of HardAndSoftScore, so also take a look at the curriculum course example for inspiration.

To avoid a "score trap" (see manual) on the soft constraint of the same interest rule, I suspect you 'll have to use the swapPillarMove too (on top of the normal changeMove and swapMove's).