A fix-and-optimize heuristic for the ITC2021 sports timetabling problem

George H. G. Fonseca () and Túlio A. M. Toffolo ()
Additional contact information
George H. G. Fonseca: Federal University of Ouro Preto
Túlio A. M. Toffolo: Federal University of Ouro Preto

Journal of Scheduling, 2022, vol. 25, issue 3, No 3, 273-286

Abstract: Abstract This paper addresses the general and challenging Sports Timetabling Problem proposed during the International Timetabling Competition of 2021 (ITC2021). The problem is expressed in a flexible format which enables modeling a number of real-world constraints that often occur in Sports Timetabling. An integer programming (IP) formulation and a fix-and-optimize heuristic are proposed to address the problem. The fix-and-optimize approach uses the IP formulation to heuristically decompose the problem into sub-problems and efficiently search on very large neighborhoods. The diverse ITC2021 benchmark instances were used to evaluate the proposed methods. The formulation resulted in proven optimal solutions for two instances. However, it failed to produce feasible solutions for most instances. The proposed fix-and-optimize, which uses an automatic sub-problem size calibration strategy, resulted in feasible solutions for 37 out of the 45 ITC2021 instances. Among these solutions, four are the best known in the literature. The proposed approach participated in the ITC2021 and was one of the finalists.

Keywords: ITC2021; Sports timetabling; Round robin tournament; Fix-and-optimize (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10951-022-00738-6 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:jsched:v:25:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s10951-022-00738-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10951

DOI: 10.1007/s10951-022-00738-6

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Scheduling is currently edited by Edmund Burke and Michael Pinedo

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