[rules-users] OptaPlanner - best strategy for variable number of planning entities?

Hi, I'm new to OptaPlanner, and reading through the planning examples in the documentation left me with a question. One problem I'm trying to model involves a variable number of planning entities, which I didn't really see addressed by any of the examples; they all seemed to me more focused on varying the states of planning variables for a fixed / known number of entities. To throw out some specifics...let's say I'm trying to optimize my attendance schedule for some convention. I have a set of problem facts, the various events going on at the convention, with each having a time (when the event happens), and a worth (how much I'd like to be there for that event). And I have a set of planning entities, the various times that I'm present at the convention. So, I'm trying to model the case where my key constraint is the total amount of time I spend at the convention...let's treat that as fixed. I don't care how many separate times I go there, though I will have to model constraints like a minimum length per visit (very inefficient to go for 10 minutes at a time), and a minimum separation between visits (annoying / inefficient to leave, then turn right around and go back, unless I get an hour break). Again, I didn't see a good way to just say "have any number of planning entities in the planning entity collection, so long as they meet the constraints". So instead, I modeled the problem as a set of visits, calculated as the max possible visits (total conference length / minimum visit duration). Then I defined each visit to have three planning variables: start time, duration, and whether that visit is "active". I'm looking forward to 6.1, where it seems there's better support for numeric ranges, but for now, just modeled start time as the set of integers representing the time range of the convention in minutes. Finally, I constructed a hard score based on the constraints above, and a soft score that represents the sum of the worth of the events that occur during the visit. However, I'm not seeing it work out too well...the engine seems to spend a lot of time messing around with one visit, and very little time trying out multiple visits with different starts and durations to capture event-rich times. I can certainly play around with parameters and engine configuration, but I thought I should first ask if I was fundamentally going about modeling the problem the wrong way, as I am very new to the OptaPlanner engine. Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions! -- View this message in context: http://drools.46999.n3.nabble.com/OptaPlanner-best-strategy-for-variable-... Sent from the Drools: User forum mailing list archive at Nabble.com.