A matheuristic for scheduling double round-robin sports tournaments

Lamas Fernandez, Carlos, Martinez-Sykora, Toni and Potts, Christopher (2022) A matheuristic for scheduling double round-robin sports tournaments. Reade, J. James (ed.) In Proceedings of the IX Mathsport International Conference 2022. pp. 46-53 .

Abstract

Scheduling a double round-robin sports tournament requires assigning matches to time slots. In professional football/soccer, there are various stakeholders such as the football clubs that are concerned about revenue, the league who aim to ensure that the competition is fair, the police who are responsible for safety outside the ground, and TV companies who invest heavily to gain broadcasting rights. The interests of these stakeholders are met by imposing numerous hard and soft constraints on the schedule of matches. An integer linear programming (ILP) model is developed which includes a mixture of hard and soft constraints of the types described above and uses binary variables that assign matches to slots. The solution methodology used is a matheuristic that fixes a large number of variables in the ILP model at each iteration to enable a new solution to be generated relatively quickly. In this fix-and-relax approach, different methods are used to determine which variables are to be fixed. Computational results are provided for the 45 instances that formed the international competition on sports timetabling (ITC2021). These instances have 16, 18 or 20 teams, with 30, 34 or 38 time slots, respectively. The main findings are that the proposed matheuristic finds solutions for most ITC2021 instances relatively quickly with all hard constraints satisfied and generates many best-known solutions for these instances.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Carlos Lamas Fernandez

Author: Toni Martinez-Sykora

Download statistics