I’m struggling with a real-world scheduling challenge and looking for algorithmic/implementation advice from people who’ve tackled similar problems. The Problem : 3-day village soccer tournament with ~354 round-robin matches across 34 groups (8 teams E-category, 6 teams G-category, 4 teams each D/F/M2, etc.) + full knockout brackets. Must fit exactly into an Excel template with specific sheet structure (Fri/Sat/Sun), merged cells, fonts, column widths. Hard Constraints (this is where LLMs fail): 12-minute slots (11min play + 1min break) across 4 fields Time windows : Kids (A,B1,B2,C1,C2) only Sat/Sun mornings, Adults different windows Minimum breaks : 12min (1 slot) between games per team (kids+adults) Field restrictions : Sunday field 4 = kids OR M2 only; Finals sequence fixed on field 1 (14:36 C2 final, 14:48 B2, etc.) No gaps : Continuous play 17:00-22:30 Fri, 08:00-20:00 Sat, 09:00-16:15 Sun Team wishes : Specific start days/times that create conflicts 354+ matches total (all group games + all knockouts/place games) What I’ve tried (all failed at scale): Claude/ChatGPT/Perplexity: Generate OR-Tools/PuLP code but can’t solve full problem or match Excel layout Excel Solver/VBA: Too slow for 350+ matches with constraints Manual: Physically impossible Specific questions for experienced schedulers : Algorithm : Round-robin + knockouts with time/field/team constraints - what’s the right approach? Genetic algorithms? Column generation? Constraint solvers : OR-Tools vs PuLP vs MiniZinc - which scales best for this? How do you model “minimum break between games” and “category time windows”? Excel output : openpyxl/pandas to replicate exact template formatting (merged cells, fonts, widths)? Or better generate CSV then format? Practical experience : Anyone built something similar? What’s the biggest pitfall? How did you validate “fairness” across fields? Heuristics first? Schedule largest groups first? Prioritize Vorrunde → knockouts? Current blocker : LLMs generate toy examples (4 teams, 1 day) but choke on real scale + Excel formatting. Would love hearing from people who’ve built production scheduling systems. Open source examples welcome. Not looking for SaaS tools, want to understand the algorithms/implementation. Thanks :-) submitted by /u/Available-Reality-54
Originally posted by u/Available-Reality-54 on r/ArtificialInteligence