Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

85. Scheduling sports tournaments with two court types

Invited abstract in session FA-2: Scheduling & Packing, stream Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization.

Friday, 8:45-10:15
Room: H4

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Melissa Koch
Institute of Computer Science, Osnabrück University
2. Sigrid Knust
Institute of Computer Science, University of Osnabrück
3. Xuan Thanh Le
Department of Optimization and Scientific Computing, Institute of Mathematics, VAST

Abstract

Balanced tournament designs are a well-studied topic in sports league scheduling, particularly with regard to assigning courts to matches in a fair and uniform way. Usually, every court is treated uniquely. In this talk, we introduce a novel variant of the problem where courts of two different types are considered.

Two consecutive matches of a player on the same court type, are called a “court type
repetition”. Our objective is to construct a schedule for a single round-robin tournament that minimizes the total number of court type repetitions.

After outlining fundamental observations, we present efficient construction methods that yield optimal solutions in various settings. We start with schedules based on the canonical 1-factorization and demonstrate that better solutions can be achieved using arbitrary factorizations.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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