  The rate at which quantum communication tasks can be performed using direct
transmission is fundamentally hindered by the channel loss. Quantum repeaters
allow, in principle, to overcome these limitations, but their introduction
necessarily adds an additional layer of complexity to the distribution of
entanglement. This additional complexity - along with the stochastic nature of
processes such as entanglement generation, Bell swaps, and entanglement
distillation - makes finding good quantum repeater schemes non-trivial. We
develop an algorithm that can efficiently perform a heuristic optimisation over
a subset of quantum repeater schemes for general repeater platforms. We find a
strong improvement in the generation rate in comparison to an optimisation over
a simpler class of repeater schemes based on BDCZ repeater schemes. We use the
algorithm to study three different experimental quantum repeater
implementations on their ability to distribute entanglement, which we dub
\emph{information processing} implementations, \emph{multiplexed}
implementations, and combinations of the two. We perform this heuristic
optimisation of repeater schemes for each of these implementations for a wide
range of parameters and different experimental settings. This allows us to make
estimates on what are the most critical parameters to improve for entanglement
generation, how many repeaters to use, and which implementations perform best
in their ability to generate entanglement.
