Scheduling the Main Professional Football League of Argentina

In this paper, we describe our work in scheduling Argentina’s First Division professional football league, the Superliga. Following existing work in sports scheduling, we develop an integer programming model for the Superliga season schedule and then, solve it using a decomposition approach. Unlike previous work, this scheme is based on the creation and assignment of cluster patterns, which take advantage of the model’s geographically driven handling of sporting fairness. We also model the assignment of matches to specific dates and time slots while simultaneously considering various conditions relating to or imposed by game broadcasters, the government, and international tournament calendars. Our work was implemented to schedule the Superliga’s 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 seasons, achieving clear improvements on a number of criteria over the previous approach.

ON THE GENERALIZED MIRRORED SCHEME FOR DOUBLE ROUND ROBIN TOURNAMENTS IN SPORTS SCHEDULING

In this paper we propose the generalized mirrored scheme for scheduling double round robin tournaments (DRRTs), a common topic in sports scheduling, to deal with the conflicting constraints of breaks and separation. In practice, usually a small number of breaks and a large separation are desirable, but typical methods of scheduling DRRTs cannot obtain both a minimum number of breaks and a positive separation. We firstly consider DRRTs by this scheme with a separation of two slots and a minimum number of breaks. In case the number of teams is a multiple of four, we show that such DRRTs could be generated by a constructive method; we also propose a model and find such DRRTs for any other numbers of teams up to 90. Secondly, we consider those with a separation of more than two. We show that if a minimum number of breaks is required, DRRTs with a separation of any number of slots could be obtained by a constructive method, for some large number of teams; otherwise, a tradeoff for a large separation at the cost of only four additional breaks exists for any number of teams.