Scheduling English Football Fixtures over the Holiday Period Using Hyper-heuristics

One of the annual issues that has to be addressed in English football is producing a fixture schedule for the holiday periods that reduces the travel distance for the fans and players. This problem can be seen as a minimisation problem which must abide to the constraints set by the Football Association. In this study, the performance of selection hyper-heuristics is investigated as a solution methodology. Hyper-heuristics aim to automate the process of selecting and combining simpler heuristics to solve computational search problems. A selection hyper-heuristic stores a single candidate solution in memory and iteratively applies selected low level heuristics to improve it. The results show that the learning hyper-heuristics outperform some previously proposed approaches and solutions published by the Football Association.