Solving the Round Robin Problem Using Propositional Logic

In this paper we present a new and extremely competitive approach to solving a notoriously hard problem from the sports scheduling domain, the round robin problem. By combining local search satisfiability algorithms and an appropriate problem encoding based on classical propositional logic, we are able to find feasible schedules many times faster than using the best existing approaches to the round robin problem. Moreover, using this scheduling as satisfiability approach we are able to solve a previously unsolved instance, the round robin problem for 20 teams.

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