I am a Java developer and I am currently working on a work force management software for food compagnies. So far, I've decided to use constraint programming (CP) to find a solution to the problem. The current version is using JaCoP as a solver, but I find it hard to make it support soft-constraint and it only use Depth First search. So I'm looking around for a different solver engine and Drools Planner seams to fit my need. I'm just concern about it's speed since I don't see any way to add global constraint (like all-different, Count, Among, etc.)

I've look closely to the nurse rostering example. My problem is very similar. Let say, I have 150 nurses, ~42 different skills, 9 shifts, ~300 events to be assigned. Whats make it easier compare to the example, I only need to plan one week. My question is simple, does Drools will be able to handle it ?

To give a better understanding of the problem I'm trying to solve, I've attach a PDF document with more explanations. (https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BykkHu_UReIvYzg3NmM2YmUtYjVhNy00NjgwLTliNjctNWJjZTMyNjU0MDM2)