The problem here is that these conflicts and preferences are constantly shifting. Two people can be good friends one week and decide they hate each others' guts the next week. And then they can go back to being friends again the week after. The Rosternator 3000 can't keep up with this so you're always going to be generating bad schedules for a certain portion of your people.

This is one of the reasons good retail managers ignore the advice of their time-keeping systems and give peoples' requests preference. The time-keeping system ignores all of the human aspects of the problem to focus on the least-important aspect of keeping a store running--making sure there are warm bodies in it.

>Two people can be good friends one week and decide they hate each others' guts the next week. And then they can go back to being friends again the week after.

So... you're saying soldiers are like girls in high school?

Yes.

"I thought this high school bullshit was over!" is one of the most depressingly funny phrases I've ever heard eighteen-year-olds repeatedly utter.

Usually being uttered by the same one's CAUSING said problems

Yeah, steer clear of anyone who loudly proclaims they "hate drama". It's like when a two-year-old starts saying they're 'not tired'.

Ever been in a university faculty meeting?

Considering soldiers are usually only a year or few out of high school, the answer is yes.

I'm just imagining the girls from my high school with weapons. Yikes!

Boys get like this too. It's an affliction of the high-school aged.

This is probably pretty close to how the roster originally came to be, except organically and without any computers.

This thought did occur to me, but I didn't have the time to continue iteration past the first revision. Police blotters don't write themselves, as it turns out.

If I had to do it today, I'd probably put the list of pair scores on one sheet (e.g. Snuffy/Smith at +5, Smith/Jones at -3) and perform iterative swapping as you suggested.

Note that this is the "stable roommates problem" and does not necessarily have an "optimal" solution (where "optimal" means "no unmatched pair of people would've rather been matched together". Eg, if Albert prefers Bob over Charles, Bob prefers Charles over Albert, and Charles prefers Albert over Bob, and all three prefer being matched with the last person over anyone else).

I did something very similar to this for my wedding seating assignments.