Sports Scheduling Research Paper
OR
PRACTICE
SCHEDULING A MAJOR COLLEGE BASKETBALL CONFERENCE
GEORGE L. NEMHAUSER
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia
MICHAEL A. TRICK
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
(Received February 1997; revision received May 1997; accepted July 1997)
The nine universities in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) have a basketball competition in which each school plays home and away games against each other over a nine-week period. The creation of a suitable schedule is a very difficult problem with a myriad of conflicting requirements and preferences. We develop an approach to scheduling problems that uses a combination of integer programming and enumerative techniques. Our approach yields reasonable schedules very quickly …show more content…
In the past few years there have been a number of papers on sports scheduling. We begin by giving a summary and classification of sports scheduling systems that allows us to contrast our scheduling system with others. We then detail the requirements of an ACC schedule and show how our scheduling system specializes in this case. Finally, we present the schedule accepted by the ACC and discuss the difficulties in getting it.
1. SPORTS SCHEDULING
Sports schedules come in two broad types: temporally constrained schedules and temporally relaxed schedules. In a temporally constrained schedule the number of slots, or time periods in which a game may appear, is equal to the number of games that each team must play plus any necessary byes for leagues with an odd number of teams. For instance, a double round-robin tournament has every team play every other team twice: once at home and once away.
Such a tournament among 9 teams requires at least 18 slots. A temporally constrained schedule has 18 slots available. A temporally relaxed schedule has more than 18 slots, and perhaps significantly more.
In a temporally relaxed schedule, it is possible to
PRACTICE
SCHEDULING A MAJOR COLLEGE BASKETBALL CONFERENCE
GEORGE L. NEMHAUSER
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia
MICHAEL A. TRICK
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
(Received February 1997; revision received May 1997; accepted July 1997)
The nine universities in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) have a basketball competition in which each school plays home and away games against each other over a nine-week period. The creation of a suitable schedule is a very difficult problem with a myriad of conflicting requirements and preferences. We develop an approach to scheduling problems that uses a combination of integer programming and enumerative techniques. Our approach yields reasonable schedules very quickly …show more content…
In the past few years there have been a number of papers on sports scheduling. We begin by giving a summary and classification of sports scheduling systems that allows us to contrast our scheduling system with others. We then detail the requirements of an ACC schedule and show how our scheduling system specializes in this case. Finally, we present the schedule accepted by the ACC and discuss the difficulties in getting it.
1. SPORTS SCHEDULING
Sports schedules come in two broad types: temporally constrained schedules and temporally relaxed schedules. In a temporally constrained schedule the number of slots, or time periods in which a game may appear, is equal to the number of games that each team must play plus any necessary byes for leagues with an odd number of teams. For instance, a double round-robin tournament has every team play every other team twice: once at home and once away.
Such a tournament among 9 teams requires at least 18 slots. A temporally constrained schedule has 18 slots available. A temporally relaxed schedule has more than 18 slots, and perhaps significantly more.
In a temporally relaxed schedule, it is possible to