A complete search method for the relaxed traveling tournament problem

The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a sports scheduling problem that includes two major issues in creating timetables: home/away pattern feasibility and travel distance. In this problem, the schedule must be compact: every team plays in every time slot. However, there are some sports leagues that have both home/away pattern restrictions and distance limits, but do not require a compact schedule. In such schedules, one or more teams can have a bye in any time slot. This leads us to a variant of the problem: the Relaxed Traveling Tournament Problem (RTTP). We present a complete search method to solve this problem based on branch-and-bound, metaheuristics and dynamic programming. Note: This is a preprint. The final publication is available at link.springer.com.