Time: March 13th, 2024 (Wednesday), from 09h00 to 10h00

Location: Seminar room on 5th floor, building A6, Institute of Mathematics (18 Hoang Quoc Viet, Cau Giay, Hanoi)

Abstract: Generating a sports league schedule is a challenging task due to the variety of different requirements which have to be addressed. The basic problem is to find a schedule for a single/double round robin tournament in which every team plays against each other team exactly once/twice, and every team plays one game per round. Additionally, several side constraints have to be respected, e.g., the avoidance of breaks (consecutive home/away games of a team), fairness issues (like opponent strengths, carry-over effects), the consideration of regions or wishes of teams and media.

This variety of specific problem settings has led to a multitude of alternative approaches and due to its complexity, the problem is often solved by decomposition techniques, i.e., it is divided into different subproblems which are solved consecutively. In this talk, the following three approaches are discussed: ``first-schedule, then-break'', ``first-break, then-schedule'', ``first assign modes, then schedule''.