Branching Based on Home-Away-Pattern Sets

Scheduling a sports league requires to solve a hard combinatorial optimization problem. We consider a league of a set T of n teams supposed to play in a single round robin tournament (SRRT). Accordingly, each team i ∈ T has to play against each other team j ∈ T, j ≠ i, exactly one match. The tournament is partitioned into matchdays (MD) being periods where matches can be carried out. Each team i ∈ T shall play exactly once per MD. Hence, we have a compact structure resulting in an ordered set P of n −1 MDs.