Interval tree with added dimension of subset matching?

Question

This is an algorithmic question about a somewhat complex problem. The foundation is this:

A scheduling system based on available slots and reserved slot

Answer 1

The suggested approaches by Arne and tinker were both helpful, but not ultimately sufficient. I came up with a hybrid approach that solves it well enough.

The main problem is that it's a three-dimensional issue, which is difficult to solve in all dimensions at once. It's not just about matching a time overlap or a tag overlap, it's about matching time slices with tag overlaps. It's simple enough to match slots to other slots based on time and even tags, but it's then pretty complicated to match an already matched availability slot to another reservation at another time. Meaning, this scenario in which one availability can cover two reservations at different times:

+---------+
| A, B    |
+---------+
xxxxx xxxxx
x A x x A x
xxxxx xxxxx

Trying to fit this into constraint based programming requires an incredibly complex relationship of constraints which is hardly manageable. My solution to this was to simplify the problem…

Removing one dimension

Instead of solving all dimensions at once, it simplifies the problem enormously to largely remove the dimension of time. I did this by using my existing interval tree and slicing it as needed:

def __init__(self, slots):
    self.tree = IntervalTree(slots)

def timeslot_is_available(self, start: datetime, end: datetime, attributes: set):
    candidate = Slot(start.timestamp(), end.timestamp(), dict(type=SlotType.RESERVED, attributes=attributes))
    slots = list(self.tree[start.timestamp():end.timestamp()])
    return self.model_is_consistent(slots + [candidate])

To query whether a specific slot is available, I take only the slots relevant at that specific time (self.tree[..:..]), which reduces the complexity of the calculation to a localised subset:

  |      |             +-+ = availability
+-|------|-+           xxx = reservation
  |  +---|------+
xx|x  xxx|x
  |  xxxx|
  |      |

Then I confirm the consistency within that narrow slice:

@staticmethod
def model_is_consistent(slots):
    def can_handle(r):
        return lambda a: r.attributes <= a.attributes and a.contains_interval(r)

    av = [s for s in slots if s.type == SlotType.AVAILABLE]
    rs = [s for s in slots if s.type == SlotType.RESERVED]

    p = Problem()
    p.addConstraint(AllDifferentConstraint())
    p.addVariables(range(len(rs)), av)

    for i, r in enumerate(rs):
        p.addConstraint(can_handle(r), (i,))

    return p.getSolution() is not None

(I'm omitting some optimisations and other code here.)

This part is the hybrid approach of Arne's and tinker's suggestions. It uses constraint-based programming to find matching slots, using the matrix algorithm suggested by tinker. Basically: if there's any solution to this problem in which all reservations can be assigned to a different available slot, then this time slice is in a consistent state. Since I'm passing in the desired reservation slot, if the model is still consistent including that slot, this means it's safe to reserve that slot.

This is still problematic if there are two short reservations assignable to the same availability within this narrow window, but the chances of that are low and the result is merely a false negative for an availability query; false positives would be more problematic.

Finding available slots

Finding all available slots is a more complex problem, so again some simplification is necessary. First, it's only possible to query the model for availabilities for a particular set of tags (there's no "give me all globally available slots"), and secondly it can only be queried with a particular granularity (desired slot length). This suits me well for my particular use case, in which I just need to offer users a list of slots they can reserve, like 9:15-9:30, 9:30-9:45, etc.. This makes the algorithm very simple by reusing the above code:

def free_slots(self, start: datetime, end: datetime, attributes: set, granularity: timedelta):
    slots = []
    while start < end:
        slot_end = start + granularity
        if self.timeslot_is_available(start, slot_end, attributes):
            slots.append((start, slot_end))
        start += granularity

    return slots

In other words, it just goes through all possible slots during the given time interval and literally checks whether that slot is available. It's a bit of a brute-force solution, but works perfectly fine.