Design Philosophy

Choice of Solver

Since I'm not an expert in operations research, I've done some research on suitable (open-source) solvers for this problem. The most popular ones seem to be Timefold (previously OptaPlanner) and Google OR-Tools. There's also a comparison between the two.

Google OR-Tools is chosen due to the support of Python, which is the language I'm most familiar with this kind of project.

Choice of Input Format

We prioritize human readability and ease of editing by hand over machine parsing simplicity.

The YAML format uses camelCase field names, following the conventions of Kubernetes.

To allow quick prototyping without defining data type classes, we choose to keep the YAML input intact in memory. This requires extracting data explicitly using utility functions.