Stratgy for finding multiple overlapping solutions ?

[Christian Nielsen]

Hi

I have this everyday problem, that I use Optaplanner to schedule a fleet of vehicles that drives around and service customers, it's hence a chained type og problem.
The customers may book or rebook appointments ad hoc even on the day of delivery and want to be presented with possible new timeslot to choose from ranging from now and 3 days onwards.

I can easily add a potential new appointment to the solution in a particular timeslot to see if it has workable solution and can be suggested to the customer, but I cannot add say 3 equal appointment for the same day only differing by timeslot as one appointment may block the others and yield a wrong result. So right now the only solution seems to be to clone the solution into 15 copies covering both this day and the next few days and then calulated them all separately, while this would work, it seems like a brute force approach. Can anyone suggest a better strategy?

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