Scheduling the Turkish Soccer League Using Mathematical Programming

Abstract

Generating a fair and feasible schedule is a difficult challenge for sports league organizers because of having various requirements from various involved parties. Some of these requirements are fairness requirements. Turkish Soccer League should be scheduled by according to these requirements especially because of the reduction of the confidence in Turkish Soccer League organizers and authorities due to the case of match fixing in recent years. As scheduling Turkish Soccer League, the prior requirements in our study are the minimization of the total number of break, carry over effect (COE) value of a schedule in addition to meeting the conflicting venue constraints. We decomposed scheduling process in phases to facilitate our solution. We used a different variation of first-break-then-schedule approach, proposed by Rasmussen and Trick (2008), to meet break conditions initially and solved each phase by applying different mathematical programming techniques including Integer Programming (IP) and Constraint Programming (CP). Our study generates a schedule having carry over effect (COE) value which is one of the lowest ones in European soccer competitions, in addition to minimizing total number of breaks.