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.

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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:

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.