A 5.875-approximation for the Traveling Tournament Problem

Stephan Westphal () and Karl Noparlik ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2014, vol. 218, issue 1, 347-360

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approximation for the Traveling Tournament Problem which is the problem of designing a schedule for a sports league consisting of a set of teams T such that the total traveling costs of the teams are minimized. It is not allowed for any team to have more than k home-games or k away-games in a row. We propose an algorithm which approximates the optimal solution by a factor of 2+2k/n+k/(n−1)+3/n+3/(2⋅k) which is not more than 5.875 for any choice of k≥4 and n≥6. This is the first constant factor approximation for k>3. We furthermore show that this algorithm is also applicable to real-world problems as it produces solutions of high quality in a very short amount of time. It was able to find solutions for a number of well known benchmark instances which are even better than the previously known ones. Copyright The Author(s) 2014

Keywords: Sports scheduling; Traveling Tournament Problem; Approximation algorithms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-012-1061-1

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