Combinatorial Models for Scheduling Sports Tournaments

Introduction

This book introduces solutions for sports scheduling problems in a variety of settings. In particular the book covers timetabling, the traveling tournament problem, carryover minimization, breaks minimization, tournament design, tournament planning, and referee assignment. A rich selection of applications to sports such as football, baseball, basketball, cricket or hockey are employed to illustrate the methods and techniques. In a step-by-step tutorial format the book describes the use of graph theory concepts, local search operators and integer programming in the context of sports scheduling.

Importance of Sports Scheduling

The methods presented in this book are essential to sports scheduling in all its dimensions, from tournaments that are followed by millions of people across the world, with broadcast rights that amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in some competitions, to amateur leagues that require coordination and logistical efforts due to the large number of tournaments and competitors.