EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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2458. Beyond leagues: a single incomplete round-robin tournament for multi- league sports timetabling

Invited abstract in session TA-16: Sports scheduling and optimization, stream OR in Sports.

Tuesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 19 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Dries Goossens
Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University
2. Miao Li
Department of Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University
3. David Van Bulck
Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University

Abstract

Most sports associations regularly face the problem of determining and scheduling games for a huge number of non-professional (youth) teams. During planning, it is key to respect venue capacities and minimize travel distance.
A classic approach is to split up teams over leagues, and then having each league play a round robin tournament. In a round robin tournament, each team competes against every other team in the tournament an equal number of times.
In this talk, we propose an alternative approach, organizing a single yet incomplete round robin tournament. In this format, each team plays the same number of games, but teams are not required to face the same opponents. We exploit this flexibility to reduce the total travel distance and venue capacity conflicts.
Besides integer programming models, we provide theoretical results and an iterative two-phase decomposition heuristic. This heuristic first determines the home-away status of teams based on the venue capacity of clubs, and next selects suitable opponents while minimizing travel distances.
Extensive experiments using real-life benchmark instances from the literature confirm the advantage of an incomplete round robin tournament compared to the classic multi-league approach and validate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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