Scheduling the Australian football league

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, such as higher attendance and TV viewership, lower costs, and increased fairness. The Australian Football League is particularly interesting because of an unusual competition format integrating a single round robin tournament with additional games. Furthermore, several teams have multiple home venues and some venues are shared by multiple teams. This paper presents a 3-phase process to schedule the Australian Football League. The resulting solution outperforms the official schedule with respect to minimizing and balancing travel distance and breaks, while satisfying more requirements

Round-robin tournaments with minimum number of breaks and two teams per club

We study round-robin tournaments for 2n teams. Here n is either interpreted as the number of clubs, each having two teams, or the number of strength groups with two teams each. For even n we give a construction of a single round-robin tournament for 2n teams with 2n - 2 breaks, where the teams of the same club have complementary home-away patterns and play against each other in the first round. If the pairs of teams are strength groups, then a cyclic permutation of the constructed schedule results in a group-balanced tournament

Breaks, cuts, and patterns

Wegeneralize the concept of a break by considering pairs of arbitrary rounds.Weshow that a set of homeaway patterns minimizing the number of generalized breaks cannot be found in polynomial time, unless P = NP. When all teams have the same break set, the decision version becomes easy; optimizing remains NP-hard.status: publishe

Referee assignment in the Chilean football league using integer programming and patterns

This article uses integer linear programming to address the referee assignment problem in the First Division of the Chilean professional football league. The proposed approach considers balance in the number of matches each referee must officiate, the frequency of each referee being assigned to a given team, the distance each referee must travel over the course of a season, and the appropriate pairings of referee experience or skill category with the importance of the matches. Two methodologies are studied, one traditional and the other a pattern-based formulation inspired by the home-away patterns for scheduling season match calendars. Both methodologies are tested in real-world and experimental instances, reporting results that improve significantly on the manual assignments. The pattern-based formulation attains major reductions in execution times, solving real instances to optimality in just a few seconds, while the traditional one takes anywhere from several minutes to more than an hour.Fil: Alarcón, Fernando. Universidad de Chile; ChileFil: Duran, Guillermo Alfredo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Cálculo; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Guajardo, Mario. Norwegian School of Economics; Norueg

Sports industry research North America: USA & Canada

The Sports Industry is a potential business that not only involves the game at the field. It includes different aspects like food & beverage, apparel, sponsorship, licensing, events, tourism, and infrastructure (ATKearney, 2011). In North America this industry is one of the most important in terms of creating a positive impact to the economy, increasing surprisingly fast the GDP of the United States and Canada. The United States and Canada are the world’s biggest sports nations that provide a wide range of sport facilities and infrastructure and hosts yearly enigmatic events in key cities like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Toronto. For this reason, we identified that these countries are a strategic move for any sports-related company to keep growing within the Sports Industry. The current report aims to provide a comprehensive research about the Sports Industry in North America, describing and analyzing possible investment opportunities in these countries for the upcoming years. The document is structured to explain an I) Overview of The Sports Industry in the United States and Canada, including the main sports leagues, secondary sports, sport facilities and new technology and trends. Then, we will discuss about the II) Main Leagues in North America considering its main teams, athletes, events, and highlight sport cases. Finally, we will describe the III) Sports Media Industry in North America, explaining about the Print, TV, Radio, Online channels and current media trends