Scheduling a triple round robin tournament for the best Danish soccer league

Abstract

In this paper we present a solution method for the highly constrained problem of finding a seasonal schedule for the best Danish soccer league. The league differs from most sports leagues, since it plays a triple round robin tournament which leads to an uneven distribution of home and away games. The solution method presented here uses a logic-based Benders decomposition in which the master problem finds home-away pattern sets while the subproblem finds timetables. Furthermore, column generation techniques are used to enhance the speed of the master problem. The computational results show that the solution method is capable of solving the problem within reasonable time and the Danish Football Association has decided to use it for scheduling the 2006/2007 season.

When sports rules go awry

“…The OR literature has many examples that report how sports schedules can be generated (e.g. Goossens and Spieksma (2012); Kendall (2008); Rasmussen (2008); Bartsch et al (2006); Croce and Oliveri (2006); Wright (2006)). As a demonstration of the importance of the schedule to the underlying economics, Lenten (2015) considers the bias of the schedules for the 2002-2011 National Football League (NFL) seasons and modifies a recently introduced model (Lenten, 2011) to provide an assessment of how these (unbalanced) scheduling biases affect the competitive balance of such leagues.…”

Round robin scheduling – a survey

“…Top team and bottom team constraints ( [4,12,13,23,25,36,38,46,48]) In some leagues special considerations are taken for teams which have just qualified for the league and teams which are known to be strong.…”

“…Complementary constraints ( [4,9,12,13,38,46,59]) When two teams share a venue, a complementary constraint is used to make sure that the two teams play home at different slots. Of course both teams play home in some sense when they meet but playing the official home game may be important since revenue is often earned by the home team.…”

A branching scheme for minimum cost tournaments with regard to real-world constraints

“…Briskorn et al [7] line out the similarity of structures of Single RRTs and planar three index assignments. Real world problems have been considered in Bartsch et al [2], Deila Croce and Oliveri [15], Durän et al [17], Kendall [19], Rasmussen [22], Ribeiro and Urrutia [24] and Schreuder [25] examine particular formulations.…”