Minimizing costs in round robin tournaments with place constraints

Abstract

In this paper we consider a general sports league scheduling problem and propose solution algorithms for it. The objective is to find a feasible schedule for a round robin tournament with minimum number of breaks and minimum total costs where additionally place constraints are taken into account. We present a ``first-break, then-schedule'' approach which uses an enumerative procedure to generate home-away patterns and integer programming for finding corresponding schedules. Computational results are presented for leagues with up to 14 teams. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.