Operations Research Techniques for Scheduling Chile's Second Division Soccer League

Guillermo Durán (), Mario Guajardo and Rodrigo Wolf-Yadlin ()
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Guillermo Durán: Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matemáticas, Universidad de Chile, 8370439 Santiago, Chile; Instituto de Cálculo and Departamento de Matemática, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Técnicas, 1033 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Rodrigo Wolf-Yadlin: Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de Chile, 8370439 Santiago, Chile

Interfaces, 2012, vol. 42, issue 3, 273-285

Abstract: In this paper, we use operations research (OR) techniques to schedule the Second Division of the Chilean professional soccer league. The solution must satisfy a series of conditions requested by league officials. Because the teams generally travel long distances by bus, geographical restrictions are particularly important. We specify the scheduling problem and solve it using an integer linear programming (ILP) model that defines when and where each match is played, subject to constraints. For the most difficult instances, we formulate a second ILP model that generates home-away patterns and assigns them to the teams; we then run the model, which determines the match schedule. Chilean league officials have successfully used the models to schedule all five Second Division tournaments between 2007 and 2010, replacing the random scheduling methodology that they used previously. Since 2007, the two formulations have been adapted to various formats with which the Second Division has experimented; these include a quadruple round robin and a two-phase tournament with zonal and national phases. The application we present is one of a number of such projects that the authors and their colleagues developed over the past few years, and it represents an expansion of the use of OR techniques for managing tasks in Chilean soccer.

Keywords: sports scheduling; soccer; home-away patterns; integer programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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