A greedy algorithm for the social golfer and the Oberwolfach problem

Daniel Schmand, Marc Schröder and Laura Vargas Koch

European Journal of Operational Research, 2022, vol. 300, issue 1, 310-319

Abstract: Inspired by the increasing popularity of Swiss-system tournaments in sports, we study the problem of predetermining the number of rounds that can be guaranteed in a Swiss-system tournament. Matches of these tournaments are usually determined in a myopic round-based way dependent on the results of previous rounds. Together with the hard constraint that no two players meet more than once during the tournament, at some point it might become infeasible to schedule a next round. For tournaments with n players and match sizes of k≥2 players, we prove that we can always guarantee ⌊nk(k−1)⌋ rounds. We show that this bound is tight. This provides a simple polynomial time constant factor approximation algorithm for the social golfer problem.

Keywords: OR in sports; Graph theory; Combinatorial optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221721007773
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:300:y:2022:i:1:p:310-319

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2021.09.018

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().