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Thank you!

The searches are trying to allocate groups of teachers to time slots, subject to the inputted constraints e.g. their students aren’t elsewhere, changing rooms are available if needed, a teacher hasn’t been allocated a different class already etc.

But I can’t tell the software which constraints are hard, which are soft, and which have alternatives we are indifferent about. Hence the need for parallel searches!

This is basically traveling salesman type of problem called Constraint Programming. Plenty of library in this space if this interest you, like OR-Tools: https://developers.google.com/optimization

> >These searches can take 12+ hours to run

> WTF. What are these searches doing?

This is why you're a techie ;)