An ILS heuristic for the traveling tournament problem with predefined venues

The Traveling Tournament Problem with Predefined Venues (TTPPV) is a single round robin variant of the Traveling Tournament Problem, in which the venue of each game to be played is known beforehand. We propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) heuristic for solving real-size instances of the TTPPV, based on two types of moves. Initial solutions are derived from canonical 1-factorizations of the tournament graph or of its subgraphs. Computational results show that the new ILS heuristic performs much better than heuristics based on integer programming and improves the best known solutions for benchmark instances. We also show that commonly used neighborhoods in the sport scheduling literature are not connected in the case of single round robin tournaments.