Scheduling the German Basketball League

Stephan Westphal ()
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Stephan Westphal: Institute for Applied Stochastics and Operations Research, Clausthal University of Technology, 38678 Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

Interfaces, 2014, vol. 44, issue 5, 498-508

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the problem of finding an optimal schedule for the German Basketball League (BBL) for the 2011–2012 season. A major issue that we address is that most of the games take place in multipurpose arenas that are also used for other events and are thus not always available. In addition, we must minimize the number of successive home or away games, assign the most interesting games to television broadcasting slots, minimize the distance teams must drive on a newly established derby day, and meet team requests for home or away games and to play specific teams.We present several algorithmic approaches and show how these models fit the BBL’s requirements. In this process, we prove that the classic models, which the BBL had applied previously and many other leagues still apply, are too limited to meet these requirements. We show that canonical schedules do not have the desired properties. We proved to the BBL that mirrored schedules cannot meet its needs, and thus convinced it to use nonmirrored schedules for the first time in its history. The BBL’s requirements are typical of sports leagues; therefore, the approaches presented are also applicable to many other sports leagues. We implemented our approach in scheduling software that we developed for the BBL and applied to its 2011–2012 season scheduling.

Keywords: sports scheduling; basketball; timetabling; tournaments; integer programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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