Scheduling a Major College Basketball Conference - Revisited

Nemhauser and Trick presented the problem of nding a timetable for the 1997/98 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) in basketball. Their solution, found with a combination of integer programming and exhaustive enumeration, was accepted by the ACC. Finite-domain constraint programmingis another programming technique that can be used for solving combinatorial search problems such as sports tournament scheduling. This paper presents a solution of round robin tournament planning based on nite-domain constraint programming. The approach yields a dramatic performance improvement, which makes an integrated interactive software solution feasible.