An ILS heuristic for the traveling tournament problem with predefined venues

Abstract

The Traveling Tournament Problem with Predefined Venues (TTPPV) is a single round robin variant of the Traveling Tournament Problem, in which the venue of each game to be played is known beforehand. We propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) heuristic for solving real-size instances of the TTPPV, based on two types of moves. Initial solutions are derived from an edge coloring algorithm applied to complete graphs. We showed that canonical edge colorings should not be used as initial solutions in some situations. Instead, the use of Vizing's edge coloring method lead to considerably better results. We also establish that the solution space defined by some commonly used neighborhoods in the sport scheduling literature is not connected in the case of single round robin tournaments, which explains the hardness of finding high quality solutions to some problem instances. Computational results show that the new ILS heuristic performs much better than heuristics based on integer programming and that it improves the best known solutions for benchmark instances.

A Comparative Analysis of Application of Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization in Solving Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP)

“…A different approach of Iteration Limited Threshold Accepting (ILTA) has been proposed by the authors of [15], where a new hyper-heuristic has been proposed by the authors. Another iteration-based model, such as Iterated Local Search (ILS) heuristic has been discussed in [16]. An effective encoding scheme has been proposed by the authors of [17], where, they have investigated several instances of TTP for double round robin TTP.…”