title: Reservation allocation algorithm
body: <p>I am looking for algorithms for allocating reservations to resources. This could be Hotel reservations matched to available rooms - Meeting reservations matched to available meeting rooms - Restaurant reservations matched to tables.</p>
  
  <p>What they have in common:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Each reservation has a specific unchangeable start and end time.</li>
  <li>Each reservation is not bound to a specific resource before the start time.</li>
  <li>There can be a variable number of resources.</li>
  <li>Every time a new reservation comes, the algorithm should at least be able to check if it is possible to match to a resource or not.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So far I have mostly looked at genetic algorithm approaches to solve the problem, but I'm having trouble encoding the problem to chromosomes.</p>
  
  <p>Any thoughts on algorithms for this is welcome, also algorithms that only finds a "good" solution as opposed to an optimal one.</p>