An Integrated Constraint Programming Approach to Scheduling Sports Leagues with Divisional and Round-Robin Tournaments

Larson, Jeffrey; Johansson, Mikael; Carlsson, Mats

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-07046-9_11

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…A constraint model for this problem was presented in [22]. We will repeat a fragment of the model here, referring the reader to [22] for further details.…”

Section: The Handball Tournament Scheduling Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auto-tabling for subproblem presolving in MiniZinc

et al. 2017

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A well-known and powerful constraint model reformulation is to compute the solutions to a model part, say a custom constraint predicate, and tabulate them within an extensional constraint that replaces that model part. Despite the possibility of achieving higher solving performance, this tabling reformulation is often not tried, because it is tedious to perform; further, if successful, it obfuscates the original model. In order to encourage modellers to try tabling, we extend the MiniZinc toolchain to perform the automatic tabling of suitably annotated predicate definitions, without requiring any changes to solvers, thereby eliminating both the tedium and the obfuscation. Our experiments show that automated tabling yields the same tables as manual tabling, and that tabling is beneficial for solvers of several solving technologies.

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“…A constraint model for this problem was presented in [22]. We will repeat a fragment of the model here, referring the reader to [22] for further details.…”

Section: The Handball Tournament Scheduling Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auto-tabling for subproblem presolving in MiniZinc

et al. 2017

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“…The Handball Tournament Scheduling problem is to schedule matches of a tournament, while respecting the rules governing the tournament, and minimising a cost function related to the availability of venues. We use the model of Dekker et al [11], which is simplified from the full model [31] by omitting some constraints. The problem has 14 teams (in two divisions of 7), and briefly it requires constructing one round-robin tournament for each division (in periods 1-7), followed by a round-robin tournament for all teams (periods 8-20) then its mirror image (periods [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

Section: Handball Tournament Schedulingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We use the model of Dekker et al [11], which is simplified from the full model [31] by omitting some constraints. The problem has 14 teams (in two divisions of 7), and briefly it requires constructing one round-robin tournament for each division (in periods 1-7), followed by a round-robin tournament for all teams (periods 8-20) then its mirror image (periods [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. Constraints are either structural (such as balancing home and away games) or seasonal (such as respecting venue unavailability, given as a parameter).…”

Section: Handball Tournament Schedulingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Tabulation in Constraint Models

Akgün¹,

Gent²,

Jefferson³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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The performance of a constraint model can often be improved by converting a subproblem into a single table constraint. In this paper we study heuristics for identifying promising candidate subproblems, where converting the candidate into a table constraint is likely to improve solver performance. We propose a small set of heuristics to identify common cases, such as expressions that will propagate weakly. The process of discovering promising subproblems and tabulating them is entirely automated in the constraint modelling tool Savile Row. Caches are implemented to avoid tabulating equivalent subproblems many times. We give a simple algorithm to generate table constraints directly from a constraint expression in Savile Row. We demonstrate good performance on the benchmark problems used in earlier work on tabulation, and also for several new problem classes. In some cases, the entirely automated process leads to orders of magnitude improvements in solver performance.Note to reviewers and editor: This paper builds on (and entirely includes) an earlier conference publication [1]. We have extended and refined the method and also performed a much more extensive experimental evaluation.

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“…Novel algorithms that assist tournament scheduling regularly evoke interest in the AI community (Larson, Johansson, and Carlsson 2014;Kim and Williams 2015;Chatterjee, Ibsen-Jensen, and Tkadlec 2016;Gupta et al 2018;Hoshino 2018). We first elaborate on existing work on comparing tournament formats, and then turn to approaches that utilize matchings for scheduling tournaments.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Ranking Quality and Fairness in Swiss-System Chess Tournaments

Führlich¹,

Cseh²,

Lenzner³

2021

Preprint

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The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swisssystem chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of these formalities is to ensure that players are paired fairly during the tournament and that the final ranking corresponds to the players' true strength order. We contest the official FIDE player pairing routine by presenting alternative pairing rules. These can be enforced by computing maximum weight matchings in a carefully designed graph. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that a tournament format using our mechanism 1) yields fairer pairings in the rounds of the tournament and 2) produces a final ranking that reflects the players' true strengths better than the state-of-the-art FIDE pairing system.

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An Integrated Constraint Programming Approach to Scheduling Sports Leagues with Divisional and Round-Robin Tournaments

Cited by 4 publications

References 18 publications

Auto-tabling for subproblem presolving in MiniZinc

Auto-tabling for subproblem presolving in MiniZinc

Automatic Tabulation in Constraint Models

Improving Ranking Quality and Fairness in Swiss-System Chess Tournaments

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