Scheduling a round robin tennis tournament under courts and players availability constraints

Citation
F. Della Croce et al., Scheduling a round robin tennis tournament under courts and players availability constraints, ANN OPER R, 92, 1999, pp. 349-361
Citations number
13
Categorie Soggetti
Engineering Mathematics
Journal title
ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH
ISSN journal
02545330 → ACNP
Volume
92
Year of publication
1999
Pages
349 - 361
Database
ISI
SICI code
0254-5330(1999)92:<349:SARRTT>2.0.ZU;2-S
Abstract
A practical problem encountered by the management of a tennis club is the o rganization of a tennis tournament for the club members. The tournament par ticipants are split into different series: in each series, every player pla ys once a week with a different opponent in a round robin tournament. All m atches are subject to a time limit corresponding to one hour. All the serie s share the same pool of courts, whose weekly availability is predefined. I n addition, the players have their own availability constraints. Given the courts and players availability, the objective is to schedule the tournamen t with no violation of the constraints or, more realistically, in order to maximize the number of feasible matches. This problem can be formulated as a maximum matching problem, with the additional constraint that each player must play just once a week. It can also be modeled as a maximum clique pro blem. A two-step heuristic procedure is proposed to solve the problem: firs t, the round robin tournaments of each series are generated, then the match es of each tournament are assigned to the available courts for every week b y means of a local search procedure. The procedure has been succesfully imp lemented and is currently used by the tennis club.