1932. Sports League Scheduling with Minitournaments
Invited abstract in session WC-40: Sports timetabling, stream Sports and Entertainment.
Wednesday, 12:30-14:00Room: Newlyn LG.02
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Johannes Schmidt
|
| Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg | |
| 2. | Armin Fügenschuh
|
| MINT, Brandenburg Technical University | |
| 3. | Moritz Matthias Böschow
|
| Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg |
Abstract
In sport scheduling for leagues with professional teams, game days with single matches are necessary to achieve fairness, which is a fundamental criterion. Thereby, the resulting high number of required game days is accepted and the length of a season not important. In amateur or youth sports leagues, these priorities change since the teams play all matches during their leisure time. A schedule with a smaller number of game days is preferred and the teams are willing to partly renounce on the fairness for this. Thus, the idea of minitournaments arised. In this format, multiple teams meet at one home team, which is one of them, and play against each other. The travel times of all teams now depend on their assignment to the respective minitourmanets and the choice of the home team. We consider in this talk a league with minitournaments of three teams at each game day and two games between each pair of teams. Additionally, the home field advantages should be divided as evenly as possible during the season to minimize the fairness loss. We present a combinatorial optimization model to compute an optimal league schedule under different objectives, prioritizing either travel distances or fairness aspects. Furthermore, we discuss the computational efficiency of the resulting models, symmetry breaking approaches, and compare them to existing schedules for amateur basketball leagues in the State of Brandenburg.
Keywords
- Programming, Mixed-Integer
- OR in Sports
- Scheduling
Status: accepted
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