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Scheduling a triple round robin tournament for the best Danish soccer league

by Rasmus V. Rasmussen
Working Papers Number 1 (March 2006)
In this paper we present a solution method for the highly constrained problem of finding a seasonal schedule for the best Danish soccer league. The league differs from most sports leagues, since it plays a triple round robin tournament which leads to an uneven distribution of home and away games. The solution method presented here uses a logic-based Benders decomposition in which the master problem finds home-away pattern sets while the subproblem finds timetables. Furthermore, column generation techniques are used to enhance the speed of the master problem. The computational results show that the solution method is capable of solving the problem within reasonable time and the Danish Football Association has decided to use it for scheduling the 2006/2007 season.
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