[rules-users] Continuous Planning values for task planning

[Josef Bajada]

Hi,

I am new to Drools and Drools Planner, so apologies if I am asking anything
obvious.

My objective is to implement a simple (for now) planner which schedules
tasks according to 2 main criteria:
- Their duration (in seconds)
- Their dependencies on other tasks (e.g. Hard Constraint that Task B has
to start between 180 and 200 seconds after Task A finishes).

Since there are gaps between dependent tasks as part of the hard
constraints other tasks can be fitted in between dependent tasks.
So the Solver needs to find the optimal start time for each task that
satisfies the hard constraints, and in the shortest total timeline possible
to complete all tasks (soft constraint).

The main problem I am finding is that this start time, which is essentially
the planning variable is a continuous variable.
Chapter 4 of the Drools documentation mentions very briefly (Section
4.3.4.1)  that planning variables can be continuous, but there does not
seem to be any more details about how to achieve this.

Even if the planning variable was discrete (say bins of 5 second
intervals), there is no upper bound as such.

How is it best to handle such planning variables in Drools Planner?

thanks,
josef
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