[wayfinder]

If anyone wants to build this by themselves, I recommend using an optimization solver library like OptaPlanner. It basically implements standard optimization algorithms you can read in academic papers (which are interesting to read!) so you don’t have to.

You can probably write a basic planner in under an hour with all the constraints you can think of. You can just continue to fiddle with the constraints and weights until you are happy without having to worry about duplicates or errors.

I’ve used it to solve cost optimization problems for companies I’ve worked with and it works really well.

[ge0ffrey]

Thanks for the kind words about OptaPlanner. We've forked OptaPlanner as Timefold. We don't have a wedding seating example in timefold-quickstarts, yet.

Someone did an wedding seating planning implementation 10 years ago: https://github.com/juanignaciosl/wedding-tables-planner but that's going to be very stale (still DRL files etc). It's probably better to start from the school-timetabling use-case in timefold-quickstarts and adjust that to your needs.

[teejae]

Thanks a lot for all the development of Optaplanner over the years! Your work is really amazing and valuable.

[ge0ffrey]

If you want to give Timefold a try locally - it should about twice as fast, still the open source version - try our single Maven or Gradle command on your codebase: https://timefold.ai/upgrade-optaplanner-to-timefold

If you're interested in writing a blog around your Wedding Seating Planner (it looks very cool!), ping me on LinkedIn and we'll happily push it on our socials.

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

Could you expand the general case of that cost optimization?