Scheduling A Major College Basketball Conference

Abstract

The nine universities in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) have a basketball competition in which each school plays home and away games against each other over a nine-week period. The creation of a suitable schedule is a very difficult problem with a myriad of conflicting requirements and preferences. We develop an approach to scheduling problems that uses a combination of integer programming and enumerative techniques. Our approach yields reasonable schedules very quickly and gave a schedule that was accepted by the ACC for play in 1997-1998.

Scheduling fixtures for Basketball New Zealand

“…Nemhauser and Trick [12] described an integer programming approach to scheduling the fixtures of the Atlantic Coast Conference; later Henz [13] tackled the same problem using constraint programming. This paper concerns the scheduling of fixtures for the most important basketball league in New Zealand.…”

Global constraints for round robin tournament scheduling

“…We consider the problem of finding all schedules that minimize the overall number of breaks. A widely accepted method of searching for intermural tournaments is to generate pattern sets first [20,15,7,8]. These are sets of home/away patterns that satisfy simple row and column constraints [7].…”

“…Table 3 shows the run times for finding all solutions of intermural tournament problems, all of which except the last one are randomly constrained as in the previous section. The last problem is the ACC 1997/98 problem [15,8], which is tightly constrained by a variety of conditions. Since we are not concerned with the computation of the pattern sets, we fix a particular pattern set for the benchmarks, except for the ACC 1997/98 problem.…”

“…However, in the presence of irregular constraints which occur in tournament planning practice and which are difficult to capture as properties of graphs, constructive methods fail and the problem degenerates to a combinatorial search problem. Techniques that have been used to solve such problems include integer programming [20,15], local search [24] and constraint programming [19,11,7]. Constraint programming has been shown recently to outperform integer programming on practical problems [8,7].…”

Assignment of swimmers to dual meet events

“…More specifically, integer programming has found a use in sports, primarily as a tool in scheduling games over a season. Examples of this include Nemhauser and Trick (1998) in scheduling college basketball; Bean and Birge (1980) in scheduling the National Basketball Association; Ferland and Fleurent (1993) in scheduling the National Hockey League; and Cain (1977) for major league baseball. More recently, integer programming has been used by Adler et al (2002) to determine when a major league baseball team has been eliminated from playoff contention.…”