The sport teams grouping problem

Túlio A. M. Toffolo (), Jan Christiaens, Frits C. R. Spieksma and Greet Vanden Berghe
Additional contact information
Túlio A. M. Toffolo: KU Leuven
Jan Christiaens: KU Leuven
Frits C. R. Spieksma: KU Leuven
Greet Vanden Berghe: KU Leuven

Annals of Operations Research, 2019, vol. 275, issue 1, No 11, 223-243

Abstract: Abstract The sport teams grouping problem (STGP) concerns the assignment of sport teams to round-robin tournaments. The objective is to minimize the total travel distance of the participating teams while simultaneously respecting fairness constraints. The STGP is an NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem highly relevant in practice. This paper investigates the performance of some complimentary optimization approaches to the STGP. Three integer programming formulations are presented and thoroughly analyzed: two compact formulations and another with an exponential number of variables, for which a branch-and-price algorithm is proposed. Additionally, a meta-heuristic method is applied to quickly generate feasible high-quality solutions for a set of real-world instances. By combining the different approaches’ results, solutions within 1.7% of the optimum values were produced for all feasible instances. Additionally, to support further research, the considered STGP instances and corresponding solutions files were shared online.

Keywords: Sport teams grouping problem; Branch-and-price; Column generation; Decomposition strategies; Integer programming; Meta-heuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-017-2595-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:annopr:v:275:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10479-017-2595-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-017-2595-z

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().