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

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

Towards prevention of sportsmen burnout : Formal analysis of sub-optimal tournament scheduling

Funding Statement: The authors are grateful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia for funding this work through the Vice Deanship of Scientific Research Chairs: Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Handling fairness issues in time-relaxed tournaments with availability constraints

Sports timetables determine who will play against whom, where, and on which time slot. In contrast to time-constrained sports timetables, time-relaxed timetables utilize (many) more time slots than there are games per team. This offers time-relaxed timetables additional flexibility to take into account venue availability constraints, stating that a team can only play at home when its venue is available, and player availability constraints stating that a team can only play when its players are available. Despite their flexibility, time-relaxed timetables have the drawback that the rest period between teams’ consecutive games can vary considerably, and the difference in the number of games played at any point in the season can become large. Besides, it can be important to timetable home and away games alternately. In this paper, we first establish the computational complexity of time-relaxed timetabling with availability constraints. Naturally, when one also incorporates fairness objectives on top of availability, the problem becomes even more challenging. We present two heuristics that can handle these fairness objectives. First, we propose an adaptive large neighborhood method that repeatedly destroys and repairs a timetable. Second, we propose a memetic algorithm that makes use of local search to schedule or reschedule all home games of a team. For numerous artificial and real-life instances, these heuristics generate high-quality timetables using considerably less computational resources compared to integer programming models solved using a state-of-the-art solver

Emerging Trends in the Dance Competition Industry: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Key Stakeholder Experiences

The purpose of this study was to assist dance competition participants in understanding the advantages and disadvantages of participating in dance competitions. The researcher evaluated the experiences and perceptions of the dance students, parents, and teachers that partake in dance competitions with the goal of uncovering the positive and negative effects dance competitions have on them. The research instruments used in this study included a multiple-choice survey, which was analyzed quantitatively, and a short answer survey, which was analyzed qualitatively. Limitations to this study included the survey questions, the number of participants, and the survey demographics. The survey was created by the researcher in an attempt to be unbiased but was not tested for validity or reliability. This study included twenty-eight participants in the first survey and twenty in the second. Most participants were acquainted with the researcher before participating in the study, which may have altered responses, even though the survey was completed anonymously. The limited participant base may have also created a survey demographic that lacked diversity. At the conclusion of the study, the data suggested that dance competition participants feel there are both positive and negative components of the dance competitions they participate in. The positives included gaining confidence, having the opportunity to perform on stage or being iv able to watch a specific dancer perform, and all of the excitement that comes with going to competitions. The negatives included the adjudication system, the unsportsmanlike behavior of fellow participants, and the scheduling system

Integration of Forecasting, Scheduling, Machine Learning, and Efficiency Improvement Methods into the Sport Management Industry

Sport management is a complicated and economically impactful industry and involves many crucial decisions: such as which players to retain or release, how many concession vendors to add, how many fans to expect, what teams to schedule, and many others are made each offseason and changed frequently. The task of making such decisions effectively is difficult, but the process can be made easier using methods of industrial and systems engineering (ISE). Integrating methods such as forecasting, scheduling, machine learning, and efficiency improvement from ISE can be revolutionary in helping sports organizations and franchises be consistently successful. Research shows areas including player evaluation, analytics, fan attendance, stadium design, accurate scheduling, play prediction, player development, prevention of cheating, and others can be improved when ISE methods are used to target inefficient or wasteful areas