SABIO: An implementation of MIP and CP for interactive soccer queries

Abstract

Soccer is one of the most popular sports in the world with millions of fans that usually raise interesting questions when the competition is partially completed. One interesting question relates to the elimination problem which consists in checking at some stage of the competition if a team i still has a theoretical chance to become the champion. Some other interesting problems from literature are the guaranteed qualification problem, the possible qualification problem, the score vector problem, promotion and relegation. These problems are NP-complete for the actual FIFA pointing rule system (0 points-loss, 1 point-tie, 3 pointswin). SABIO is an online platform that helps users discover information related to soccer by letting them formulate questions in form of constraints and go beyond the classical soccer computational problems. In the paper we considerably improve the performance of an existing CP model and combine the use of MIP and CP to answer general soccer queries in a real-time application.