Re: [rules-users] Purpose of difficultyWeightFactoryClass in @PlanningEntity annotation.

Hello Michiel, first in order to get faster to a solution. To my understanding this is not quite true. DifficultyWeight defines what Entities will likely be more difficult to plan, period. What is actually DONE with this statement (of difficulty) is decided by meta heuristics algorithm and/or by different selectors (not sure about this one though). What I am saying - difficulty weight just says "yo, dude, this planning entity is hard/easy to plan" - meta heuristics algorithm (also construction heuristics) then say "oh great, then I start with easy ones" or "oh dude, then I get first down to hard ones" or even "nice, but I don't give a damn about difficulty whatdoyaknow" *assumption mode on* The reason why you all of the sudden get negative hard score MIGHT be that the "right" entities are falling out of the selection. And this is controlled by meta heuristics algorithm. As I understand all the meta heuristics magic - it can solve problems with the space of 10^650 because... it cheats! Yes, it does not evaluate ALL of the possible values (entities or planning variables) but selects a subset of those (the ones likely to yield a solution). And one more thought - changing difficulty weight calculation (in factory) should normaly NOT have such a drastic influence on score (up to now I used difficulty weight calcs to increase performance). So I am suggesting here that the issue MAY lay some other place (typical would be local optima). *assumption mode off* In drools planner docs there is some decent information on selection of stuff. If I may suggest, start with construction heuristic types and check out the docs where it says what BEST_FIT or, respectively, BEST_FIT_DECREASING does. I hope I could at least give you couple of ideas on where to proceed with the issue. br Reinis On 01/07/2013 09:26 PM, Michiel Vermandel wrote: