So I have lectures and time periods and some lectures need to be taught in a specific time period. How do i do that?
Does scoreHolder.addHardConstraintMatch(kcontext, 10); solve this as a hard constraint? Does the value of positive 10 ensure the constraint of courses being in a specific time period?
I'm aware of the Penalty pattern but I don't want to make a lot of CoursePeriodPenalty objects. Ideally, i'd like to only have one CoursePeriodReward object to say that CS101 should be in time period 9:00-10:00
Locking them with Immovable planning entities won't work as I suspect you still want OptaPlanner to decide the room for you - and currently optaplanner only supports MovableSelectionFilter per entity, not per variable (vote for the open jira for that).
A positive hard constraint would definitely work. Your score will be harder to interpret for your users though, for example a solution with a hard score of 0 won't be feasible (either it didn't get that +10 hard points or it lost 10 hard points somewhere else).
Or you could add a new negative hard constraint type that says if != desiredTimeslot then loose 10 points.