OR APPLICATIONS IN SPORTS SCHEDULING AND MANAGEMENT

OR methods have been successfully applied in the evaluation of team performance. Team managers, players, fans, and journalists are often eager to know how close a team is of classification. Probabilistic and exact methods are used to tackle this question. Timetabling is the major OR application in sports. Sport leagues and teams need schedules satisfying different types of constraints and optimizing, for example, the fairness or the distance traveled. Timetable optimization in sport competitions is a hard problem for which several OR techniques have been applied. Also, sport applications motivate the students and therefore can also be successfully used in OR courses and classrooms.