[rules-users] Any additional (better) documentation for the examples included in Drools Planner product?

[Geoffrey De Smet]

> We have been having real hard time understanding the examples with 
> such limited/no documentation about the examples that are included in 
> the product. Did someone find any other documentation on them apart 
> from the 5-6 paragraphs mentioned in the reference manual? Also, we 
> found the reference manual not detailed/ easy enough for us to delve 
> into the product to understand its features better. The biggest 
> question is , Is this product production ready and supported by Redhat 
> yet? 
Planner is being used in production in lots of case cases (off the top 
of my head: satellites bandwidth scheduling, pipe cutting, advertisement 
scheduling, employee rostering, ...).
It's not productized (yet) by Red Hat. For more information about 
Planner productization, contact your local Red Hat sales office or our 
Product Manager.
   http://engage.jboss.com/forms/jboss-contact-sales
> Did you see the reference manual here:
> http://www.jboss.org/drools/documentation
>
> Which are the 5-6 paragraphs you are referring to?
>
> I'll concede that there could be shorter summaries of the manual for 
> getting started.
>
> Jon 

> Yes, I think the java docs and the example source code needs some work 
> on documentation. Also, it would be really helpful if you can include 
> some documentation about the approach taken to solving these examples. 
> Majority of the reference manual has just the problem statements for 
> these problems (except the cloud balance problem that is pretty 
> basic), not the approach used to solve it. 
Except for the cloud balancing and nqueens problem, the example specific 
documentation is indeed meager, but 1) it's getting better 
(contributions welcome) and 2) they often have a link to the official 
competition, which explains the problem in detail.
However, all the important techniques to solve those examples (such as 
chaining for vrp, construction heuristics, tabu search, ...) are 
explained one by one in the rest of the manual.
All example's code is up to date, but some are better (curriculum 
course, vehicle routing, ...) than others (examination, miss manners, ttp).

Is there's a specific example you're interested in seeing better explained?