[rules-users] Your suggestions for rules for pretty simple problem

I'm new to constraint programming and Drools Planner. I've read through the docs and built some rules that would probably get me to the right answer, eventually :) I was hoping to get your suggestions for better concrete rules. The problem is I need to order items in a performance with the following logical rules: 1) All items of the same category must appear together. 2) A performer can be in multiple items, but ideally there'd be at least three items between any of her two items The approaches I took are: - For (1), count the number of transitions from one category to another. Subtract this to the hard score. - For (2), three separate rules, each of which assert that an item at position i does not share performers with an item at position i+1, i+2 and i+3 (one of these per rule). The number of shared performers would be subtracted from the hard score. The scoring and my choice for construction heuristic (FIRST_FIT) are just naive selections. I haven't gotten to optimizing either of these -- just wanted to check with you guys to make sure my rules are sane. Thanks in advance, jason