SFA Referee Allocation Scheme

Declaration I, Nikolaos Polatidis, confirm that this work submitted for assessment is my own and is expressed in my own words. Any uses made within it of the works of other form (e.g., ideas, equations, figures, text, tables, programs) are properly acknowledged at any point of their use. A list of references employed is included. Abstract For many sports, the allocation of officials to matches is performed manually and is a very time consuming procedure. For the Scottish Football Association (SFA), the allocation of referees and other officials to matches is governed by a number of rules specifying the expertise required from the different types of official at each level, e.g. Scottish Premiership League referee must be a grade 1 with high experience. The allocation requires an SFA secretary to expend several hours to find suitable officials, contact them and assign them. Most of the time, the secretary is a volunteer who performs the allocation as a hobby and it would be useful to reduce his costs and time. The project aims to reduce the burden on SFA, and potentially other secretaries, by developing a program to assign SFA officials. A suitable algorithm must be devised to search through the set of data about matches and officials and find a potential allocation. The program then updates the database with the new data, and provides a web interface for both secretaries and officials. The project was proposed by the author and its achievements of can be summarized as follows. To prepare the background for the project, a literature review of referee allocation has been undertaken, together with an investigation of existing allocation tools, and consultation with the SFA. The requirements for a prototype allocator were established as well as possible by consultation with the SFA. A range of algorithms and tools for solving the referee allocation problem have been investigated, including backtracking/constraint-solving approach. A new greedy allocation algorithm has been developed. A prototype system using the new greedy algorithm has been implemented and evaluated with SFA secretaries. A final usable referee allocation system has been designed that uses the greedy algorithm, and is extended after evaluation of the prototype. The final allocation system based provides both a command line and a web interface and has also been evaluated by SFA secretaries. In their letters of recommendation in Appendix F the SFA secretaries indicate that the final allocation system it will be …