are you talking about codifying the matching rules as cost functions and then optimizing that as a linear system of equations? that's something i remember doing in college, but it's been a while. =) are there any existing software tools out there that helps in that regard? i'm not sure it fits my use case, but it's good to explore.

i'm working on a platform that helps hourly workers find jobs. today that matching is fairly straightforward, but it will get more complicated over time as we get develop better heuristics for matching candidates. it would be nice to be declarative about the matching rules and let the system figure out how to do the matching.