ECCO 2024
Abstract Submission

59. Minimal and fair presence times for single-day sports tournaments with multiple fields

Invited abstract in session FD-1: Fairness, stream Fairness.

Friday, 15:30 - 17:00
Room: L226

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Lisa Garcia Tercero
Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University
2. Dries Goossens
Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University
3. David Van Bulck
Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University

Abstract

In this work, we study an amateur single round-robin tournament where all games take place at one location and a limited number of fields is available. Moreover, each team needs a resting time of at least one time slot between every two games they play. This setting regularly occurs in practice, and fairness regarding the resting times is a frequently studied topic since differences in resting times may affect the outcome of the games. Sometimes having more resting time is perceived as desirable, yet in amateur tournament environments teams prefer to play their games in quick succession so they can return home without delay. Therefore, we generate schedules minimizing presence times, defined for each team as the total number of time slots they are present, assuming they arrive right before their first game and leave immediately after their last game. We focus on creating schedules that are both efficient (by minimizing the total presence time) and fair (by minimizing the maximum presence time). The proposed heuristic is based on the circle method for asynchronous tournaments and adapted for tournaments with multiple fields. When enough fields are available and the number of teams is odd, the heuristic finds a schedule with an absolute performance guarantee equal to 1, meaning both the total and the maximum presences time of this schedule are 1 higher than the optimal presence times.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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