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Hybrid IP/CP Methods for Solving Sports Scheduling Problems

by Rasmus Vinther Rasmussen
PhD Dissertations September 2006
The field of sports scheduling comprises a challenging research area with a great variety of hard combinatorial optimization problems and challenging practical applications. This dissertation gives a comprehensive survey of the area and a number of new contributions are presented. First a general solution method for solving double round robin schedules is developed and afterwards the approach is applied to the Danish soccer league. The solution method is capable of handling the large number of constraints present in the practical application and it was used for scheduling the 2006/2007 season. Furthermore, a classical sports scheduling problem known as the traveling tournament problem is considered and a heuristic approach is presented. Finally a new problem known as the timetable constrained distance minimization problem is defined and a number of solution methods for this problem is evaluated.
Format available: PDF (1 MB)
Thesis advisor: Kim Allan Andersen