Scheduling double round-robin tournaments with divisional play using constraint programming

Scheduling double round-robin tournaments with divisional play using constraint programming

We propose a tournament format that extends a traditional double round-robin format with divisional single round-robin tournaments. Elitserien, the top Swedish handball league, uses such a format for its league schedule. We introduce a constraint programming model that characterizes the general double round-robin plus divisional single round-robin format. This integrated model allows scheduling...

An Integrated Constraint Programming Approach to Scheduling Sports Leagues with Divisional and Round-Robin Tournaments

Previous approaches for scheduling a league with round-robin and divisional tournaments involved decomposing the problem into easier subproblems. This approach, used to schedule the top Swedish handball league Elitserien, reduces the problem complexity but can result in suboptimal schedules. This paper presents an integrated constraint programming model that allows to perform the scheduling in ...

Scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments

We study the problem of scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments. We consider three measures of a schedule that concern the quality and fairness of a tournament. We show that the schedule generated by the well-known “circle design” performs well with respect to all three measures when the number of teams is even, but not when the number of teams is odd. We propose a different schedule th...

Integer and Constraint Programming Approaches for Round-Robin Tournament Scheduling

Scheduling Single Round Robin Tournaments with Fixed Venues

Sports scheduling is a very attractive application area due to the importance of the problems in practice and to their interesting mathematical structure. We introduce a new problem with practical applications, consisting in scheduling a compact single round-robin tournament with fixed venue assignments for each game. Two integer programming formulations are proposed and compared. Comparative n...