Round Robin Tournaments

Description

The problem is to schedule a tournament of n teams over n-1 weeks, with each week divided into n/2 periods, and each period divided into two slots. The first team in each slot plays at home, whilst the second plays the first team away. A tournament must satisfy the following three constraints: every team plays once a week; every team plays at most twice in the same period over the tournament; every team plays every other team. More on the Round Robin tournaments...

Business Applications

This problem occurs in sports scheduling, and has been studied, in particular, for large basket-ball conferences.

Modelling & Solving

We use a constraint model - Java file (6kb) [view] - inspired by this article.

To solve the problem, we simply select the games using a first-fail heuristic (smallest domain): Java file (2kb) [view].

Results

Although not optimized, this constraint model allows to solve problems that are untractable for commercial MIP solvers.