Preface
This guide walks you through the process of creating a Spring Boot application with Red Hat Business Optimizer’s constraint solving artificial intelligence (AI). You will build a REST application that optimizes a school timetable for students and teachers.
Your service will assign Lesson instances to Timeslot and Room instances automatically by using AI to adhere to the following hard and soft scheduling constraints:
- A room can have at most one lesson at the same time.
- A teacher can teach at most one lesson at the same time.
- A student can attend at most one lesson at the same time.
- A teacher prefers to teach in a single room.
- A teacher prefers to teach sequential lessons and dislikes gaps between lessons.
Mathematically speaking, school timetabling is an NP-hard problem. That means it is difficult to scale. Simply iterating through all possible combinations with brute force would take millions of years for a non-trivial dataset, even on a supercomputer. Fortunately, AI constraint solvers such as Red Hat Business Optimizer have advanced algorithms that deliver a near-optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. What is considered to be a reasonable amount of time is subjective and depends on the goals of your problem.
Prerequisites
- OpenJDK 8 or later is installed. Red Hat build of Open JDK is available from the Software Downloads page in the Red Hat Customer Portal (login required).
- Apache Maven 3.2 or higher or Gradle 4 or higher is installed. Maven is available from the Apache Maven Project website. Gradle is avaialbe from the Gradle Build Tool website.
- An IDE, such as IntelliJ IDEA, VSCode, Eclipse, or NetBeans is available.
