Sports Scheduling

An Assessment of
Various Approaches to
Solving the n-Round
Robin Tournament

Noren De La Rosa
Mallory Ratajewski
Introduction

 Scheduling tournaments in a sports league

 Focusing on Round Robin Tournaments
– Single Round Robin Tournament (SRRT): each
team meets every other team once
– Double Round Robin Tournament (DRRT): each
team meets every other team twice
 Economic impact: quality of schedule affects
the revenue of the sports team
What is the best schedule?

 Home-away pattern
– Balance between number of home and away games
– Prefer alternating home away pattern
 Any deviation is considered a break
 Minimizing Distance Travelled
 Other factors:
– Availability of stadium
– Preferences to increase revenues
– Top team and bottom team constraints
– Geographical constraints
Main Considerations

 Minimizing number of breaks

– Used when teams return home after each away game
instead of travelling to another away game
– Alternating patterns usually preferred
– Considers the fans
– Ensures regular earnings from home games
 Minimizing distance travelled
– Used when teams travel to multiple away games without
returning home
– Huge savings can be obtained
Minimizing Number of Breaks

 Graph theoretical approaches

– 1-factorization: partitioning the games into n-1 slots, each
node will be incident to exactly one edge in each 1-factor
 Practical applications: constrained minimum break
problem
– Decomposition approach
– Combinatorial design, IP, enumeration techniques
– See Nemhauser and Trick
– Constraint programming approaches; see Henz
Minimizing Distance Travelled

 Similar to a travelling salesman problem

 Problem is too large to solve using IP in a
reasonable amount of time
 Various heuristics used instead
 The travelling tournament problem proposed
by Easton, Nemhauser, and Trick
The Travelling Tournament Problem

 Double round robin tournament to be played by n

teams over (2n-2) periods or weeks, where each
team plays every period
 Objective: minimize distance travelled by each team
 Additional Constraints:
– Maximum “road trip” of three games
– Maximum “home stand” of three games
– Repeater rule
TTP Solution Approaches

 What Methods Can We Use to Solve the

TTP?
– Integer programming
– Constraint programming
– Hybrid approaches involving heuristics
A Tiling Approach for Fast
Implementation of the TTP

 Model the road trips as “tiles”

 Each tile will contain “blocks”, which represent
individual games
– (i.e. – a road trip with 3 opponents is considered as one tile,
with 3 blocks)
 Three phase approach:
– Phase I – Tile Creation
– Phase II – Tile Placement
– Phase III – Block Placement
TTP Tiling Algorithm

 Create a set of tiles for each team. These tiles are

placed in a grid of n rows representing teams and
(2n-2) columns representing weeks
 As tiles are placed, other cells of the grid are filled in
to keep the schedule consistent
 When there are no tiles remaining, they are broken
into their component blocks
 If not all the blocks can be placed  block
placement is backtracked to find additional solutions
 If all blocks can be placed  a solution is generated
TTP Tiling Algorithm

Scheduling grid and tiles for Team 1 & Team 2

A Demonstrative Example

Princeton Harvard Yale Dartmouth Brown Columbia

Princeton 0 63 56 78 51 44

Harvard 63 0 7 29 91 27

Yale 56 7 0 32 85 22

Dartmouth 78 29 32 0 115 34

Brown 51 91 85 115 0 85

Columbia 44 27 22 34 85 0
Phase I: Tile Creation

 Find the MST from  Create Tiles

Prim’s algorithm
C
Y H D
Y P

P B

H B

D
Phase II: Tile Placement

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Princeton

Harvard

Yale

Dartmouth

Brown

Columbia Y H D P B
Phase III: Block Placement

 All remaining unplaced tiles are broken into

individual blocks
 These blocks are placed into the scheduling
grid
 Backtracking is used when blocks do not
lead to a solution
Conclusions

 Sports scheduling has huge economic

implications for the sports industry
 Optimal solutions that consider the many
constraints are time consuming
 Hybrid solutions involving heuristics are
close to optimality and require less time
 Many opportunities for further research,
particularly involving hybrid approaches
References

 A. Bar-Noy, D. Moody, A Tiling Approach for Fast

Implementation of the Travelling Tournament Problem, PATAT
(2006) 351-358.
 K. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, Solving the Travelling
Tournament Problem: A Combined Integer Programming and
Constraint Programming Approach, PATAT (2002) 100-109.
 M. Henz, T. Muller, S. Thiel, Global Constraints for Round
Robin Tournament Scheduling, European Journal of
Operational Research 153 (2004) 92-101.
 R. V. Rasmussen, M. A. Trick, Round Robin Scheduling – A
Survey, European Journal of Operational Research 188 (2008)
617-636.