Thank you for the pointers! I've been interested in crew scheduling systems for my company to make effective use of personnel. Is the problem of producing ideal time slots for appointments requiring a crew (pattern of ordered and unordered availability) very different?
Perhaps not very different, but each problem formulation has its own complication.
For column generation, specifically, the routine that generates the columns incorporates a lot of problem-specific information. The rest of the solver is more general.
Here is an open-source column generation solver that currently achieves the best solutions on that benchmark: https://github.com/PetterS/monolith/tree/master/minimum/line...