[rules-users] Drools Planner - split and join parallelism

[Willem van Asperen]

Hi All,

I have an idea that I would like to bounce of the list.

As far as I understand, Drools Planner does not do any parallel
searching. It uses a single solver thread that does all the work.

What if I would forage not only the best solution so far, but a couple
of "promising" solutions and split these off to run on a separate
thread. I would split these itteratively down to a given level of iteration.

When these threads return I would then pick the best solution from the
returned values.

Using a multi-core box or even a server farm I could massively increase
the searched problem space and do it without loosing too much time (some
parallel management overhead).

Has anyone thought of such scheme before? Any luck in implementing?
Do you see any flaws?

Just a thought.

Regards,
Willem