About Venue Seating Wizard

Why it exists

Seating an event by hand is a constraint satisfaction problem that people solve with sticky notes. Families have to stay together, some guests must not share a table, a few have already been promised a seat next to the dance floor, and every table holds a fixed number of chairs. Change one decision and the rest shift. Venue Seating Wizard states that problem explicitly and lets a solver do the rearranging.

How the optimizer works

The solver replaced an earlier Python service built on OR-Tools CP-SAT, and reproduces that model's objective coefficient for coefficient. It scores an arrangement on three terms: group cohesion, weighted by each group's cohesion strength and the square root of its size; unmet seating preferences, weighted by the normalized distance between tables or from a table to an area rectangle; and the number of tables used, so the venue prefers fewer, fuller tables. Rather than proving optimality, it constructs a good arrangement greedily and improves it with simulated annealing over relocate, swap, ejection-chain and group-move neighbourhoods, evaluating each candidate move incrementally. Only arrangements that respect every table capacity are ever reported.

Architecture

The whole application is a static site. There is no backend, no account, and no per-solve cost. Optimization happens in a Web Worker in your own browser, which is why it works offline once loaded and why cancelling a run is instant — the worker is simply terminated. Guest lists are parsed, solved and exported locally; nothing about your event is transmitted anywhere. The interface is available in English and in Hebrew with full right-to-left support.

What it does not do

• It does not store your data, sync between devices, or offer collaborative editing.
• It does not print place cards or table numbers; export the CSV and use your own stationery workflow.
• It does not prove optimality — it finds good arrangements fast, and better ones the longer it runs.

Who builds it

Venue Seating Wizard is built and maintained by Aviram Kofman, an AI engineer. The source is public at github.com/doodledood/seats-app. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome — see the contact page.