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

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

Rivalries

Rivalries are a key aspect of sports, but one with few counterparts elsewhere in economic theory. In this paper rivalries are modeled as a habitual good, and complementary in fan utility with other trade between residents of team locations. Some implications for optimal team investment in rivalry capital, for league investment in competitive balance, and for the fundamental differences between rivalries in team and individual sports are derived.Rivalry, rivalries, team sports

Scheduling a non-professional indoor football league : a tabu search based approach

This paper deals with a real-life scheduling problem of a non-professional indoor football league. The goal is to develop a schedule for a time-relaxed, double round-robin tournament which avoids close successions of games involving the same team in a limited period of time. This scheduling problem is interesting, because games are not planned in rounds. Instead, each team provides time slots in which they can play a home game, and time slots in which they cannot play at all. We present an integer programming formulation and a heuristic based on tabu search. The core component of this algorithm consists of solving a transportation problem, which schedules (or reschedules) all home games of a team. Our heuristic generates schedules with a quality comparable to those found with IP solvers, however with considerably less computational effort. These schedules were approved by the league organizers, and used in practice for the seasons 2009-2010 till 2016-2017

Optimization of Drive Time and Competitiveness in Sports League Design

Club sports, also known as recreational team sports, are prevalent in the metropolitan areas of United States nowadays. However, there is a key concern for organizers, which is how to reduce the time that players spend driving to and from matches while keeping league divisions competitive. We adopt a three-step approach to solve this problem. Initially, we analyze the drive time data between clubs’ locations to determine the geographic regions for the league. And then, clubs are assigned to divisions based on their rankings within in the league as well as their home facilities’ geographic regions. Finally, divisions are further subdivided to minimize the drive time. Alternatively, we present another two solutions using an integrated model as well as a heuristic. The integrated model focuses on optimizing competitiveness while keeping drive time as a constraint, and the heuristic attempts to improve the drive time while preserving competitiveness. Applying any of the three methods to the game planning to the Tennis Competitors of Dallas, a large and well-established sports league in Texas, USA, we demonstrate that all processes can rearrange the existing divisions in a way that not only shortens the drive time for players, but also maintains an acceptable level of competition

An instance data repository for the round-robin sports timetabling problem

The sports timetabling problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that consists of creating a timetable that defines against whom, when and where teams play games. This is a complex matter, since real-life sports timetabling applications are typically highly constrained. The vast amount and variety of constraints and the lack of generally accepted benchmark problem instances make that timetable algorithms proposed in the literature are often tested on just one or two specific seasons of the competition under consideration. This is problematic since only a few algorithmic insights are gained. To mitigate this issue, this article provides a problem instance repository containing over 40 different types of instances covering artificial and real-life problem instances. The construction of such a repository is not trivial, since there are dozens of constraints that need to be expressed in a standardized format. For this, our repository relies on RobinX, an XML-supported classification framework. The resulting repository provides a (non-exhaustive) overview of most real-life sports timetabling applications published over the last five decades. For every problem, a short description highlights the most distinguishing characteristics of the problem. The repository is publicly available and will be continuously updated as new instances or better solutions become available

Major League Baseball\u27s Monopoly Power and the Negro Leagues

This article argues that the demise of the Negro Leagues was caused by the confluence of several factors. First, the Negro Leagues operated with weak relational contract structures, a condition exacerbated by their over-reliance on star players. Second, and perhaps most important, integration forced the Negro Leagues to compete in a market dominated by the monopoly power of the Major Leagues. By 1922, perhaps earlier, the Major Leagues had acquired a monopoly over the market for White professional baseball players in the United States through its reserve system. Thereafter, the Major Leagues strengthened that monopoly with the development of Branch Rickey’s other great innovation: the development of the minor leagues as the farm system for the Major Leagues. Finally, the owners of the Negro Leagues appear to have accepted the inevitability of extinction. This article first describes the relational contract structures of the Negro Leagues. Second, it examines the possible circumstances under which the Negro Leagues or some remnant could have survived after the integration of the player market. Third, the article describes how the Major Leagues acquired and maintained a monopoly over the market for White professional players through the reserve system, and the subsequent inclusion of Black players. That part further explains how the use of that monopoly power destroyed the Negro Leagues. Finally, the article discusses various legal strategies that the Negro Leagues could have used in trying to survive