I think you could also see this as a graph coloring problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_coloring#Scheduling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_colo

I think you could also see this as a graph coloring problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_coloring#Scheduling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_coloring#Scheduling Edit: to elaborate, each committee would be a vertex and a committee-vertex is connected to another vertex if one or more of their members overlap. Once you’ve got such a graph you simply have to a assign a color (or number/letter/anything) to every vertex in the graph, with the requirement that no neighboring (as defined by being connected by an edge) vertexes are allowed to have the same color. You also try to use the minimum amount of colors needed. Then you can safely schedule the committees with the same colors for the same timeslots, and be sure that everybody will be able to attend.