Round-robin scheduling with regard to rest differences

Tasbih Tuffaha (), Burak Çavdaroğlu () and Tankut Atan ()
Additional contact information
Tasbih Tuffaha: Kadir Has University
Burak Çavdaroğlu: Kadir Has University
Tankut Atan: Bahçeşehir University

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, 2023, vol. 31, issue 2, No 1, 269-301

Abstract: Abstract Fairness is a key consideration in designing sports schedules. When two teams play against each other, it is only fair to let them rest the same amount of time before their game. In this study, we aim to reduce, if not eliminate, the difference between the rest durations of opposing teams in each game of a round-robin tournament. The rest difference problem proposed here constructs a timetable that determines both the round and the matchday of each game such that the total rest difference throughout the tournament is minimized. We provide a mixed-integer programming formulation and a matheuristic algorithm that tackle the rest difference problem. Moreover, we develop a polynomial-time exact algorithm for some special cases of the problem. This algorithm finds optimal schedules with zero total rest difference when the number of teams is a positive-integer power of 2 and the number of games in each day is even. Some theoretical results regarding tournaments with one-game matchdays are also presented.

Keywords: Sports scheduling; Round-robin tournaments; Rest difference; Heuristics; 90C27 Combinatorial optimization; 90C90 Applications of mathematical programming; 90C11 Mixed integer programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11750-022-00637-1 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:topjnl:v:31:y:2023:i:2:d:10.1007_s11750-022-00637-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.de/orders.htm

DOI: 10.1007/s11750-022-00637-1

Access Statistics for this article

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research is currently edited by Juan José Salazar González and Gustavo Bergantiños

More articles in TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research from Springer, Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().