Balancing the Traveling Tournament Problem for Weekday and Weekend Games
نویسندگان
چکیده
The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a wellknown NP-complete problem in sports scheduling that was inspired by the application of optimizing schedules for Major League Baseball to reduce total team travel. The techniques and heuristics from the n-team TTP can be extended to optimize the scheduling of other sports leagues, such as the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league in Japan. In this paper, we describe the additional scheduling constraints required by the NPB league, such as the requirement that each team play the same number of weekend home games, weekday home games, weekend road games, and weekday road games. We fully solve this TTP-variant for the case n = 6, and conclude the paper by presenting the official 2013 NPB Central League Schedule, where we helped this Japanese baseball league reduce total team travel by over six thousand kilometres.
منابع مشابه
Complexity of the traveling tournament problem
We consider the complexity of the traveling tournament problem, which is a well-known benchmark problem in tournament timetabling. The problem was supposed to be computationally hard ever since its proposal in 2001. Recently, the first NP-completeness proof has been given for the variant of the problem were no constraints on the number of consecutive home games or away games of a team are consi...
متن کاملA 5.875-approximation for the Traveling Tournament Problem
In this paper we propose an approximation for the Traveling Tournament Problem which is the problem of designing a schedule for a sports league consisting of a set of teams T such that the total traveling costs of the teams are minimized. Thereby, it is not allowed for any team to have more than k home-games or k away-games in a row. We propose an algorithm which approximates the optimal soluti...
متن کاملConstructive Algorithms for the Constant Distance Traveling Tournament Problem
In this abstract, we deal with the Constant Distance Traveling Tournament Problem (CDTTP) [4], which is a special class of the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP), established by Easton, Nemhauser and Trick [1]. We propose a lower bound of the optimal value of CDTTP, and two algorithms that produce feasible solutions whose objective values are close to the proposed lower bound. For some size of ...
متن کاملThe Inter-League Extension of the Traveling Tournament Problem and its Application to Sports Scheduling
With the recent inclusion of inter-league games to professional sports leagues, a natural question is to determine the “best possible” inter-league schedule that retains all of the league’s scheduling constraints to ensure competitive balance and fairness, while minimizing the total travel distance for both economic and environmental efficiency. To answer that question, this paper introduces th...
متن کاملAn approximation algorithm for the traveling tournament problem
In this abstract, we deal with the traveling tournament problem (TTP), which is a well-known benchmark problem established by Easton, Nemhauser and Trick [2]. We consider the case that both the number of consecutive away games and that of consecutive home games are at most three. We propose a lower bound of the optimal value of TTP, and construct an approximation algorithm yielding a feasible s...
متن کامل