[rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)

[Geoffrey De Smet]

Mark Proctor wrote:
> Carlsen, Len wrote:
>>
>>
>> Other issues are the performance of the Drools Solver and having 
>> thousands of rules compiled, loaded and running. During registration 
>> we could have thousands of rules executing concurrently. The rules 
>> engine and the BRMS would be services as part of an SOA infrastructure 
>> (and an OSGi service environment).  Anyone got any experience with 
>> Drools in an OSGi environment with respect to class loading issues 
>> when compiling rules and facts from other bundles since rules and 
>> facts may be in different bundles? Bundle buddy class loading?
>>
> No but it is something that interests us, please give us your OSGi 
> feedback. Solver is not currently a supported product, its very much R&D 
> alphaware, but I'm sure geoffrey would love your feedback, good to see 
> people are evaluating it.

yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)

The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination competition:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/examevaluation.htm
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883 
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard 
constraints and 7 soft constraints:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/examevaluation.htm

The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a 
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.

There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but 
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard 
constraints.

One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once 
  the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related 
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules 
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.

With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet