In order to make the administration simpler, I created a table in MySQL that assigns an employee to a certain shiftType. In my code I stated that once an employee is assigned to a shiftType, he or she automatically has the skills needed for that shiftType, hence the skill == $shiftType part in the rule. -- View this message in context: http://drools.46999.n3.nabble.com/Optaplanner-rule-to-assign-employee-onl... Sent from the Drools: User forum mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Thanks for the reply. It helped to see my mistake. I have now simplified the rule for testing purposes. I now have: rule "alternativeSkill" when $skill : Skill(code == '1') $employee : Employee() not SkillProficiency(employee == $employee, skill == $skill) then scoreHolder.addHardConstraintMatch(kcontext, -1);//scoreHolder.addSoftConstraintMatch(kcontext, - $contractLine.getWeight()); end I have three employees and 19 shifts. 1 employee has the necessary skills to do the shifts, the other 2 not. When I run the program I get: 14:42:19.237 [main] DEBUG o.o.c.i.l.DefaultLocalSearchSolverPhase - Step index (135), time spend (20000), score (-2hard/-182soft), best score (-2hard/-182soft), accepted/selected move count (85/252) for picked step (2013-12-09(Mon)_intake->evgey_Intaketeam(Evelien Geysen - Intaketeam) <=> 2013-12-05(Thu)_intake->mavan_Intaketeam(Marie Van de Vliet - Intaketeam)). 14:42:19.237 [main] INFO o.o.c.i.l.DefaultLocalSearchSolverPhase - Phase (1) localSearch ended: step total (136), time spend (20000), best score (-2hard/-182soft). 14:42:19.237 [main] INFO o.o.core.impl.solver.DefaultSolver - Solving ended: time spend (20000), best score (-2hard/-182soft), average calculate count per second (19839). I get 2 hard errors as expected. But the best solution still assigns all three employees to the shifts. Why do I not get a solution where only the one qualified employee is assigned to all shifts? That way I would get 0 hard errors. Am I missing something? -- View this message in context: http://drools.46999.n3.nabble.com/Optaplanner-rule-to-assign-employee-onl... Sent from the Drools: User forum mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

If you copied the employee rostering example, you can click on the shifts to assign them to another employee. Before you do that, write down the score. Then use the trick above the reassign the shifts as you believe it's better. Now write down the score again. Is the score better? On 26-11-13 09:29, ns wrote: