I'm trying to clean up an enterprise BI system that currently is using a prioritized FIFO scheduling algorithm (so a priority 4 report from Tuesday will be executed before priority 4 reports from Thursday and priority 3 reports from Monday.) Additional details:
I think I could get optaPlanner up and running for this scenario, with hard rules around priority and some soft rules around average time in the queue. I'm new to scheduling optimization so I guess my question is what should I be looking for in this situation to decide if optaPlanner is going to help me or not?
The problem looks like a form of bin packing (and possibly job shop scheduling), which are NP-complete, so OptaPlanner will do better than a FIFO algorithm.
But is it really NP-complete? If all of these conditions are met, it might not be:
If all these conditions are met, OptaPlanner won't be able to do better than a correctly written greedy algorithm (which schedules the highest priority job that is the smallest/largest first). If any of these conditions aren't met (for example you buy 10 new servers which are faster), then OptaPlanner can do better. You just have to evaluate if it's worth spending 1 thread to figure that out.
If you use OptaPlanner, definitely take a look at real-time scheduling and daemon mode, to replan as new reports enter the system.