RobinX: A three-field classification and unified data format for round-robin sports timetabling

European Journal of Operational Research

Nobibon³

2020

Self Cite

Due to unforeseen events (e.g. bad weather conditions), association football league schedules are not necessarily played as they were announced in the beginning of the season. This paper analyses the impact of uncertainty on the quality of football league schedules by examining fifteen seasons of ten major European football leagues. We describe several quality measures, related to breaks, the fairness of the ranking, and cancelled matches. The empirical study reveals that matches that were rescheduled to another date have a profound impact on the quality of the resulting schedule, indicating that football schedules in Europe deal poorly with uncertainty. Moreover, we present several proactive and reactive approaches in order to mitigate this problem. The former determine where to insert so-called catch-up rounds as buffers in the schedule, while the latter reschedule matches to these catch-up rounds when uncertain events occur. We evaluate combinations of proactive and reactive approaches, and provide recommendations to practitioners (e.g. four catch-up rounds usually suffice, and immediate irrevocable rescheduling is not beneficial).

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proactive and reactive strategies for football league timetabling

European Journal of Operational Research

Nobibon³

2020

Self Cite

“…This section briefly outlines the three-field notation ( α /β/γ ), as proposed by Van Bulck et al (2020), to describe different variants of the sports-timetabling problem.…”

Section: A Three-field Notation For Sports Timetablingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This format, however, has limited utility with respect to the ease of data manipulation and is not extensible towards several real-world problems. Recently, Van Bulck et al (2020) proposed a more advanced XML-supported three-field notation, coined RobinX, to describe and exchange sports timetabling instances and solutions. RobinX can store nearly every constraint found in the literature and is complemented with a C++-library to read, write and evaluate these XML files.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Instance Data Repository for the Round-robin Sports Timetabling Problem

Bulck

Management and Labour Studies

̈nberger

et al. 2020

Self Cite

The sports timetabling problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that consists of creating a timetable that defines against whom, when and where teams play games. This is a complex matter, since real-life sports timetabling applications are typically highly constrained. The vast amount and variety of constraints and the lack of generally accepted benchmark problem instances make that timetable algorithms proposed in the literature are often tested on just one or two specific seasons of the competition under consideration. This is problematic since only a few algorithmic insights are gained. To mitigate this issue, this article provides a problem instance repository containing over 40 different types of instances covering artificial and real-life problem instances. The construction of such a repository is not trivial, since there are dozens of constraints that need to be expressed in a standardized format. For this, our repository relies on RobinX, an XML-supported classification framework. The resulting repository provides a (non-exhaustive) overview of most real-life sports timetabling applications published over the last five decades. For every problem, a short description highlights the most distinguishing characteristics of the problem. The repository is publicly available and will be continuously updated as new instances or better solutions become available.

“…Deciding upon the matches to be played in each round of a single or double round robin tournament is known to be of great practical importance in scheduling professional leagues such as soccer competitions. Indeed, scheduling a round robin tournament has attracted a lot of attention in the scientific literature [9,16]; a popular approach to do so is known as a first-break, then-schedule approach [14]. The relevance of the first-break, then-schedule approach is strengthened by the observation that, when scheduling multiple leagues consecutively, first-break then-schedule is able to take capacity considerations of clubs that have teams playing in different leagues, into account [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Flexibility of Home Away Pattern Sets

Lambers

Spieksma

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

A popular approach to construct a schedule for a round-robin tournament is known as first-break, then-schedule. Thus, when given a Home Away Pattern (HAP) for each team, which specifies for each round whether the team plays a home game or an away game, the remaining challenge is to find a round for each match that is compatible with both team's patterns. When using such an approach, it matters how many rounds are available for each match: the more rounds are available for a match, the more options exist to accommodate particular constraints. We investigate the notion of flexibility of a set of HAPs, and introduce a number of measures assessing this flexibility. We show how the so-called Canonical Pattern Set (CPS) behaves on these measures, and, by solving integer programs, we give explicit values for all single-break HAP-sets with at most 16 teams.