Sports scheduling

Abstract

Sports scheduling has been an extremely active area of research over the past twenty years. One important reason for this is that the computational methods for creating playable sports schedules have improved enough to be useful to real sports leagues. A key aspect to these computational improvements has been the development of hybrid methods that combine two or more of integer programming, constraint programming, metaheuristics, or other core optimization approaches. While there is a broad range of models and applications in sports scheduling, there have been two main classes of problems studied: break minimization problems and travel minimization problems. I illustrate how hybrid methods can be used for these two problems, as well as provide some comments on other, lesser studied problems. I also give some directions for further research in this area.