Soccer schedules in Europe: an overview

In this paper, we give an overview of the competition formats and the schedules used in 25 European soccer competitions for the season 2008-2009. We discuss how competitions decide the league champion, qualification for European tournaments, and relegation. Following Griggs and Rosa (Bull. ICA 18:65-68, 1996), we examine the popularity of the so-called canonical schedule. We investigate the presence of a number of properties related to successive home or successive away matches (breaks) and of symmetry between the various parts of the competition. We introduce the concept of ranking-balancedness, which is particularly useful to decide whether a fair ranking can be made. We also determine how the schedules manage the carry-over effect. We conclude by observing that there is quite some diversity in European soccer schedules, and that current schedules leave room for further optimizing

Heuristics for the traveling repairman problem with profits

In the traveling repairman problem with profits, a repairman (also known as the server) visits a subset of nodes in order to collect time-dependent profits. The objective consists of maximizing the total collected revenue. We restrict our study to the case of a single server with nodes located in the Euclidean plane. We investigate properties of this problem, and we derive a mathematical model assuming that the number of visited nodes is known in advance. We describe a tabu search algorithm with multiple neighborhoods, and we test its performance by running it on instances based on TSPLIB. We conclude that the tabu search algorithm finds good-quality solutions fast, even for large instances

Scheduling parallel batching machines in a sequence

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Motivated by the application of scheduling a sequence of locks along a waterway, we consider a scheduling problem where multiple parallel batching machines are arranged in a sequence and process jobs that travel along this sequence. We investigate the computational complexity of this problem. More specifically, we show that minimizing the sum of completion times is strongly NP-hard, even for two identical machines and when all jobs travel in the same direction. A second NP-hardness result is obtained for a different special case where jobs all travel at an identical speed. Additionally, we introduce a class of so-called synchronized schedules and investigate special cases where the existence of an optimum solution which is synchronized can be guaranteed. Finally, we reinforce the claim that bidirectional travel contributes fundamentally to the computational complexity of this problem by describing a polynomial time procedure for a setting with identical machines and where all jobs travel in the same direction at equal speed.status: publishe

Exact algorithms for the matrix bid auction

In a combinatorial auction, multiple items are for sale simultaneously to a set of buyers. These buyers are allowed to place bids on subsets of the available items. A special kind of combinatorial auction is the so-called matrix bid auction, which was developed by Day [Expressing preferences with price-vector agents in combinatorial auctions. PhD thesis, University of Maryland; 2004]. The matrix bid auction imposes restrictions on what a bidder can bid for a subsets of the items. This paper focusses on the winner determination problem, i.e. deciding which bidders should get what items. We discuss the computational complexity of the winner determination problem for a special case of the matrix bid auction. We present two mathematical programming formulations for the general matrix bid auction winner determination problem. Based on one of these formulations, we develop two branch-and-price algorithms to solve the winner determination problem. Finally, we present computational results for these algorithms and compare them with results from a branch-and-cut approach based on Day and Raghavan [Matrix bidding in combinatorial auctions. Manuscript; 2006].status: publishe

Online interval scheduling on two related machines: the power of lookahead

© 2019, The Author(s). We consider an online interval scheduling problem on two related machines. If one machine is at least as twice as fast as the other machine, we say the machines are distinct; otherwise the machines are said to be similar. Each job j∈ J is characterized by a length pj, and an arrival time tj; the question is to determine whether there exists a feasible schedule such that each job starts processing at its arrival time. For the case of unit-length jobs, we prove that when the two machines are distinct, there is an amount of lookahead allowing an online algorithm to solve the problem. When the two machines are similar, we show that no finite amount of lookahead is sufficient to solve the problem in an online fashion. We extend these results to jobs having arbitrary lengths, and consider an extension focused on minimizing total waiting time.status: publishe

Production planning problems in printed circuit board assembly

This survey describes some of the main optimization problems arising in the context of production planning for the assembly of printed circuit boards. The discussion is structured around a hierarchical decomposition of the planning process into distinct optimization subproblems, addressing issues such as the assignment of board types to machine groups, the allocation of component feeders to individual machines, the determination of optimal production sequences, etc, The paper reviews the literature on this topic with an emphasis on the most recent developments, on the fundamental structure of the mathematical models and on the relation between these models and some 'environmental' variables such as the layout of the shop or the product mix. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved

No-Wait Scheduling for Locks

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