Combinatorial Models for Scheduling Sports Tournaments

This book introduces solutions for sports scheduling problems in a variety of settings. In particular the book covers timetabling, the traveling tournament problem, carryover minimization, breaks minimization, tournament design, tournament planning, and referee assignment. A rich selection of applications to sports such as football, baseball, basketball, cricket or hockey are employed to illustrate the methods and techniques. In a step-by-step tutorial format the book describes the use of graph theory concepts, local search operators and integer programming in the context of sports scheduling.