A Further Improvement on Approximating TTP-2

The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a hard but interesting sports scheduling problem inspired by Major League Baseball, which to design double round-robin schedule such that each pair of teams plays one game in other’s home venue, minimizing the total distance traveled all n (n even). In this paper, we consider TTP-2, i.e., TTP with more constraint team can have at most two consecutive games or away games. Due different structural properties, known algorithms for TTP-2 are n/2 being odd and even. For n/2, best approximation ratio about \((1+12/n)\), even \((1+4/n)\). further improve from \((1+4/n)\) \((1+3/n)\) Experimental results on benchmark sets show our algorithm previous instances \(1\%\) \(4\%\).