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