Social Golfer Problem

Description

The problem is to schedule a golf tournament during n weeks. Each week, 8 groups of 4 golfers (foursome) are formed. Each golfer should only golf with the same persons only once. More on the Social Golfer Problem...

Business Applications

This problem occurs in sports scheduling. It is a generalisation of the problem of constructing a round-robin tournament schedule.

Modelling & Solving

We use a constraint model - Java file (4kb) [view] - inspired by this note.

To solve the problem, we allocate the golfers by numbers to the foursomes: Java file (2kb) [view].

Results

This constraint model allows to find a 9-weeks solution. It is still an open problem to determine if there is a 10-weeks solution (it is easy to prove that there is no solution with more than 10 weeks).