[Scheduling seminar] Dries Goossens (Ghent Uni) | Sports Scheduling: From Consulting to Science

Keywords: Sports scheduling, Unified data format, International timetabling competition, Benchmarking, Instance space analysis, Algorithm selection

Any sports competition needs a schedule, specifying when and where teams meet each other. Apart from a number of pioneering theoretical results, most sports timetabling contributions in the literature read as case studies, describing a single problem instance for which a tailored algorithm is developed and compared to a manual solution. While the reported problems are challenging, and the algorithms made an impact in practice, it is hard to assess algorithmic performance. Indeed, real-life problem instances are rarely shared, and few realistic benchmark instances are available. In this talk, we discuss our efforts to obtain insights in the strengths and weaknesses of several state-of-the-art sport scheduling algorithms, and to predict which algorithm to select for which type of problem. The story covers the development of a problem classification and unifying data format, the generation of a set of diverse and realistic benchmark instance, the organization of a timetabling competition, and an instance space analysis for sports scheduling.

Organized by Zdenek Hanzalek (CTU in Prague), Michael Pinedo (New York University), and Guohua Wan (Shanghai Jiao Tong).