The sport teams grouping problem

Abstract

DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal.If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:

Variable Neighborhood Search for Major League Baseball Scheduling Problem

“…As in the case of the travelling tournament problem (TTP), the real-life situation for Major League Baseball aims to optimize the regular-season schedule at the minimum total travelled distance [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Similarly, with the travelling umpire problem (TUP), the primary objective is to minimize umpire travel [21][22][23][24][25][26]. In another case, the goal is to minimize the total number of breaks [2,6,12,[27][28][29][30].…”

The multi-league sports scheduling problem, or how to schedule thousands of matches

“…First, the teams are clustered into leagues of even size. Common practice is to (i) use a geographical clustering, ensuring that teams of the same strength/age category are in a same league, and (ii) to avoid teams of the same club to be present in the same league, see [17] for a discussion of the problem of grouping teams into leagues. Leagues of even size make sense, as they allow each team to play on each round; and although the total number of teams may not be an exact multiple of the league size, with an even league size the vast majority of the teams will be still able to play each round.…”

Multi-league sports scheduling with different leagues sizes

“…The main goal here is to minimize the resulting total travel distance while respecting competitive balance constraints and other considerations. This problem is known as the sports team grouping problem (Toffolo et al, 2019), or the sports team realignment problem (e.g. Saltzman and Bradford (1996), Mitchell (2003), Ji and Mitchell (2005), Recalde et al (2018)).…”