I have the following problem to solve, perhaps you could give me some ideas regarding the problem - solving approach:
There are:
2 days.
For each day:
Each teacher occupies one classroom
Further constrains: - For each parent, all appointments must be sequential (having at maximum 1 hour pause) - Each parent should have to visit the school one day only. - For each teacher, all appointments within the day must be sequential (having at maximum 2 hours pause) - Out of the 16 teachers, 3 can only be present one of the two days.
I'm trying to find an approach to produce the appointments schedule, obviously without having to calculate all possible variations until all the requirements are met. Any ideas?
You need to define your constraints a bit more; i.e., what is the relationship between students and teachers? What is the relationship between students and parents? Do parents have to have individual appointments, or are the parents of a single student allowed to meet with a single teacher together?
I'd approach this with an initial (in testing) naive approach; just pick your highest constrained resource (looks like the teachers that can only be present for one of the two days), schedule those using the first available resources, and then continue through the set of resources, scheduling them using the first available resources that match their constraints and see if you can schedule the entire set. If not, you need to find your limiting resource(s), and apply some heuristics to your matching to find the best way to optimize those limited resources.
It's a bit of a tricky problem; have fun!