Constructive algorithms for the constant distance traveling tournament problem

Abstract

The traveling tournament problem considers scheduling round-robin tournaments that minimize traveling distance, which is an important issue in sports scheduling. Various studies on the traveling tournament problem have appeared in recent years, and there are some variants of this problem. In this paper, we deal with the constant distance traveling tournament problem, which is a special class of the traveling tournament problem. This variant is essentially equivalent to the problem of 'maximizing breaks' and that of 'minimizing breaks', which is another significant objective in sports scheduling. We propose a lower bound of the optimal value of the constant distance traveling tournament problem, and two constructive algorithms that produce feasible solutions whose objective values are close to the proposed lower bound. For some size of instances, one of our algorithms yields optimal solutions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.