Rules can be used to make your configuration more dynamic. One common example is to set one value for resource-stickiness during working hours, to prevent resources from being moved back to their most preferred location, and another on weekends when no-one is around to notice an outage.

Another use of rules might be to assign machines to different processing groups (using a node attribute) based on time and to then use that attribute when creating location constraints.

Each rule can contain a number of expressions, date-expressions and even other rules. The results of the expressions are combined based on the rule's boolean-op field to determine if the rule ultimately evaluates to true or false. What happens next depends on the context in which the rule is being used.