Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem by Packing Three-Vertex Paths

Abstract

The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a complex problem in sports scheduling whose solution is a schedule of home and away games meeting specific feasibility requirements, while minimizing the total distance traveled by all the teams. A recently-developed "hybrid" algorithm, combining local search and integer programming, has resulted in best-known solutions for many TTP instances. In this paper, we tackle the TTP from a graph-theoretic perspective, by generating a new "canonical" schedule in which each team's three-game road trips match up with the underlying graph's minimum-weight P_3-packing. By using this new schedule as the initial input for the hybrid algorithm, we develop tournament schedules for five benchmark TTP instances that beat all previously-known solutions.

Cite

Text

Goerigk et al. "Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem by Packing Three-Vertex Paths." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2014. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V28I1.9031

Markdown

[Goerigk et al. "Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem by Packing Three-Vertex Paths." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2014.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2014/goerigk2014aaai-solving/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V28I1.9031

BibTeX

@inproceedings{goerigk2014aaai-solving,
  title     = {{Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem by Packing Three-Vertex Paths}},
  author    = {Goerigk, Marc and Hoshino, Richard and Kawarabayashi, Ken-ichi and Westphal, Stephan},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2014},
  pages     = {2271-2277},
  doi       = {10.1609/AAAI.V28I1.9031},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2014/goerigk2014aaai-solving/}
}