[rules-users] Is my project a suitable candidate for Drools?

[bolsover]

Although a reasonably experienced Java programmer, I'm completely new to
Drools and am just in the process of exploring some options for my current
project.  Advice from practioners here would be very welcome.

An existing web based b2b application allows clients to select products from
the available range by selecting items from a product tree where nodes are
used to group similar items.

The new requirement is for and expert engine that guides the client through
a series of qestions and can accept a range of parameters that describe the
product (in terms such as RPM, pressure, flow rate, size, colour, etc.). The
engine should then select an appropriate solution from a range of existing
product or, propose a new custom product (that might actaully get designed
in the fly) based on the client requirements. If no suitable solution is
found, the collected data should be referred to human engineers for
consideration.

I had originally considered a simple Question/Answer mechanism where the
Answer to a Question simply points the user to the next Question or the
Solution. But this seems to lack sophistication and has difficulty when
applied to questions that give rise to multi-dimensional (spatial) and
multi-type (double, boolean, string etc.) answers.

Can practitioners advise, is Drools a suitable solution? Or is it overkill
for what is actually a reasonably simple problem?

db

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