Project scheduling modification

Question

I run the optaplanner examples and they are looking really interesting. I want to dive deaper into this tool. To get a start I have some first questions:

• Where to start with my modifications? Is it neccessary to code if I just want to provide another input? Or will I have to modify the A-1.xml for example?
• If I want to add availabilitites to my resources for certain days so that I can assign resources to tasks if the resource is available for all days of the task
• If a resource is not available for one day of the tasks duration, I want to assign another resource. So either a task needs to be split or two differnt resources can be assigned to one task. This requirement is already respected in http://docs.jboss.org/optaplanner/release/6.2.0.CR4/optaplanner-docs/html_single/images/Chapter-Use_cases_and_examples/projectJobSchedulingUseCase.png

Looking forward to my first steps.

Answer 1

to add new occurrences of existing constraints, alter the input data files. The txt format is described in the the problem specification description, the xml format is just a straightforward XStream serialization of the domain classes.

To add custom constraint types, start by opening the examples sources in your IDE.

Then take a look at the domain package. Classes like Job, ExecutionMode, ResourceRequirement, etc should sound familiar from the problem specification description.

Then take a look at the score constraint rules. I see those are a bit difficult to grok in this use case, in the other examples (such as cloud balancing) it's easier to understand.