A complete search method for the relaxed traveling tournament problem

Abstract

The traveling tournament problem is a sports scheduling problem that includes two major issues in creating timetables: home/away pattern feasibility and travel distance. In this problem, the schedule must be compact: every team plays in every time slot. However, there are some sports leagues that have both home/away pattern restrictions and distance limits, but do not require a compact schedule. In such schedules, one or more teams can have a bye in any time slot. This leads us to a variant of the problem: the relaxed traveling tournament problem. We present a complete search method to solve this problem based on branch-and-bound, metaheuristics and dynamic programming. © 2013, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and EURO - The Association of European Operational Research Societies.