Dependent randomized rounding to the home-away assignment problem in sports scheduling

Abstract

Suppose that we have a timetable of a round-robin tournament with a number of teams, and distances among their homes. The home-away assignment problem is to find a home-away assignment that minimizes the total traveling distance of the teams. We propose a formulation of the home-away assignment problem as an integer program, and a rounding algorithm based on Bertsimas, Teo and Vohra's dependent randomized rounding method [2]. Computational experiments show that our method quickly generates feasible solutions close to optimal. Copyright © 2006 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.