Scheduling in sports: An annotated bibliography

Sports have worldwide appeal. Professional sport leagues involve significant investments in players. Events such as the Olympics Games, the Football World Cup and the major golf and tennis tournaments generate huge worldwide television audiences and many sports are multi-million dollar industries. A key aspect of sporting events is the ability to generate schedules that optimize logistic issues and that are seen as fair to all those who have an interest. This is not just restricted to generating the fixtures, but also to other areas such as assigning officials to the games in the competitions. This paper provides an annotated bibliography for sports scheduling articles. This area can be traced back over 40 years. It is noticeable that the number of papers has risen in recent years, demonstrating that scientific interest is increasing in this area.

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[19]  Mike Wright,et al.  Timetabling County Cricket Fixtures Using a Form of Tabu Search , 1994 .

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[22]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Referee Assignment in Sports Leagues , 2006, PATAT.

[23]  Jan A. M. Schreuder,et al.  Construction of Basic Match Schedules for Sports Competitions by Using Graph Theory , 1997, PATAT.

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[25]  P. Harker,et al.  Scheduling a Major College Basketball Conference , 1998 .

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[32]  Esther R. Lamken.  Balanced Tournament Designs , 2006 .

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[36]  C. Fleurent,et al.  Computer Aided Scheduling For A Sport League , 1991 .

[37]  Amina Lamghari,et al.  Structured Neighborhood Tabu Search for Assigning Judges to Competitions , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling.

[38]  David E. Goldberg,et al.  Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning , 1988 .

[39]  Dominique de Werra,et al.  Some models of graphs for scheduling sports competitions , 1988, Discret. Appl. Math..

[40]  Alexander Rosa,et al.  One-factorizations of the complete graph - A survey , 1985, J. Graph Theory.

[41]  Helena Ramalhinho Dias Lourenço,et al.  Iterated Local Search , 2001, Handbook of Metaheuristics.

[42]  Jin-Kao Hao,et al.  Solving the Sports League Scheduling Problem with Tabu Search , 2000, Local Search for Planning and Scheduling.

[43]  Alexander Rosa,et al.  Premature sets of 1-factors or how not to schedule round robin tournaments , 1982, Discret. Appl. Math..

[44]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  Principles of Artificial Intelligence , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[45]  T. Van Voorhis,et al.  Highly constrained college basketball scheduling , 2002, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[46]  Mesut Yavuz,et al.  Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues , 2008, Comput. Oper. Res..

[47]  Sigrid Knust.  Scheduling sports tournaments on a single court minimizing waiting times , 2008, Oper. Res. Lett..

[48]  James C. Bean,et al.  Reducing Travelling Costs and Player Fatigue in the National Basketball Association , 1980 .

[49]  Martin Henz,et al.  Scheduling a Major College Basketball Conference - Revisited , 2001, Oper. Res..

[50]  Michael A. Trick.  A Schedule-Then-Break Approach to Sports Timetabling , 2000, PATAT.

[51]  Dirk C. Mattfeld,et al.  Memetic Algorithm timetabling for non-commercial sport leagues , 2004, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[52]  Jean-Charles Régin.  Minimization of the number of breaks in sports scheduling problems using constraint programming , 1998, Constraint Programming and Large Scale Discrete Optimization.

[53]  Mike Wright.  Scheduling fixtures for New Zealand Cricket , 2005 .

[54]  James R. Evans.  Play Ball!--The Scheduling of Sports Officials. , 1984 .

[55]  Charles Fleurent,et al.  Allocating Games for the NHL Using Integer Programming , 1993, Oper. Res..

[56]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Heuristics for the mirrored traveling tournament problem , 2007, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[57]  Sigrid Knust,et al.  Sports league scheduling: Graph- and resource-based models , 2007 .

[58]  Kevin K. H. Cheung.  A Benders approach for computing lower bounds for the mirrored traveling tournament problem , 2009, Discret. Optim..

[59]  Janny Leung,et al.  Devising a Cost Effective Schedule for a Baseball League , 1994, Oper. Res..

[60]  Stefan Irnich,et al.  A new branch-and-price algorithm for the traveling tournament problem , 2010, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[61]  M. Wright.  A Fair Allocation of County Cricket Opponents , 1992 .

[62]  D. Werra.  Scheduling in Sports , 1981 .

[63]  Michael A. Trick,et al.  The Timetable Constrained Distance Minimization Problem , 2006, CPAIOR.

[64]  Guillermo Durán,et al.  Scheduling the Chilean Soccer League by Integer Programming , 2007, Interfaces.

[65]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  A simulated annealing approach to the traveling tournament problem , 2006, J. Sched..

[66]  Timothy L. Urban,et al.  A constraint programming approach to the multiple-venue, sport-scheduling problem , 2006, Comput. Oper. Res..

[67]  Dries R. Goossens,et al.  Scheduling the Belgian Soccer League , 2009, Interfaces.

[68]  Esther R. Lamken.  A few more partitioned balanced tournament designs , 1996, Ars Comb..

[69]  Mariusz Meszka,et al.  Round Robin Tournaments with One Bye and No Breaks in Home-Away Patterns Are Unique , 2005 .

[70]  Thomas Stützle,et al.  The Ant Colony Optimization Metaheuristic: Algorithms, Applications, and Advances , 2003 .

[71]  Pierre Hansen,et al.  Variable Neighborhood Search , 2018, Handbook of Heuristics.

[72]  Goldberg,et al.  Genetic algorithms , 1993, Robust Control Systems with Genetic Algorithms.

[73]  Dirk Briskorn,et al.  Feasibility of home-away-pattern sets for round robin tournaments , 2008, Oper. Res. Lett..

[74]  Jin-Kao Hao,et al.  A linear-time algorithm to solve the Sports League Scheduling Problem (prob026 of SPLib) , 2004, Discret. Appl. Math..

[75]  Jan A. M. Schreuder,et al.  Combinatorial aspects of construction of competition Dutch Professional Football Leagues , 1992, Discret. Appl. Math..

[76]  X. Zhang,et al.  Scheduling sports competitions at multiple venues - Revisited , 2006, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[77]  Jeffrey S. Smith,et al.  Scheduling Umpire Crews for Professional Tennis Tournaments , 2007, Interfaces.

[78]  Tomomi Matsui,et al.  Constructive Algorithms for the Constant Distance Traveling Tournament Problem , 2006, PATAT.

[79]  Michael A. Trick,et al.  Using Sports Scheduling to Teach Integer Programming , 2004 .

[80]  Peter van Beek,et al.  Mathematically Clinching a Playoff Spot in the NHL and the Effect of Scoring Systems , 2008, Canadian Conference on AI.

[81]  Dominique de Werra,et al.  Construction of balanced sports schedules using partitions into subleagues , 2008, Oper. Res. Lett..

[82]  Walter D. Wallis,et al.  Scheduling a Tournament , 2006 .

[83]  Robert J Willis,et al.  Scheduling the Cricket World Cup—a Case Study , 1993 .

[84]  Dirk Briskorn,et al.  A branch-and-price algorithm for scheduling sport leagues , 2009, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[85]  Jin-Kao Hao,et al.  Using solution properties within an enumerative search to solve a sports league scheduling problem , 2008, Discret. Appl. Math..

[86]  Federico Della Croce,et al.  Scheduling the Italian Football League: an ILP-based approach , 2006, Comput. Oper. Res..

[87]  F. Glover,et al.  Handbook of Metaheuristics , 2019, International Series in Operations Research & Management Science.

[88]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  An application of integer programming to playoff elimination in football championships , 2005, Int. Trans. Oper. Res..

[89]  Scott A. Vanstone,et al.  Balanced tournament designs and related topics , 1989, Discret. Math..

[91]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Maximizing breaks and bounding solutions to the mirrored traveling tournament problem , 2006, Discret. Appl. Math..

[92]  Michel Gendreau,et al.  Metaheuristics: Progress in Complex Systems Optimization , 2007 .

[93]  Bryan C. Ball,et al.  Optimal Scheduling for Even-Numbered Team Athletic Conferences , 1977 .

[94]  N. Meyers,et al.  H = W. , 1964, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[95]  Dominique de Werra,et al.  On the multiplication of divisions: The use of graphs for sports scheduling , 1985, Networks.

[96]  Michael A. Trick,et al.  Round robin scheduling - a survey , 2008, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[97]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Scheduling the Brazilian Soccer Tournament with Fairness and Broadcast Objectives , 2006, PATAT.

[98]  Andreas Drexl,et al.  Scheduling the professional soccer leagues of Austria and Germany , 2006, Comput. Oper. Res..

[99]  Andreas T. Ernst,et al.  An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering , 2004, Ann. Oper. Res..

[100]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  A Hybrid ILS Heuristic to the Referee Assignment Problem with an Embedded MIP Strategy , 2007, Hybrid Metaheuristics.

[101]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  A New Lower Bound to the Traveling Tournament Problem , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling.

[102]  Emile H. L. Aarts,et al.  Theoretical aspects of local search , 2006, Monographs in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series.