Indoor football scheduling

This paper deals with a real-life scheduling problem from an amateur indoor football league. The league consists of a number of divisions, in each of which a double round robin tournament is played. The goal is to develop a schedule which avoids close successions of matches involving the same team. This scheduling problem is interesting, because matches are not planned in rounds. Instead, each team has a number of time slots available to play its home games. Furthermore, in contrast to professional leagues, alternating home and away matches is hardly relevant. We present a mathematical programming formulation and a heuristic based on tabu search, which resulted in high-quality schedules that have been adopted in practice.