Operations Research Techniques for Scheduling Chile's Second Division Soccer League

DURAN, GUILLERMO ALFREDO; GUAJARDO, MARIO; WOLF YADLIN, RODRIGO

INTERFACES

INFORMS

Lugar: Hanover; Año: 2012 vol. 42 p. 273 - 285

0092-2102

In this paper, we use operations research (OR) techniques to schedule the Second Division of the Chileanprofessional soccer league. The solution must satisfy a series of conditions requested by league officials. Becausethe teams generally travel long distances by bus, geographical restrictions are particularly important. We specifythe scheduling problem and solve it using an integer linear programming (ILP) model that defines when andwhere each match is played, subject to constraints. For the most difficult instances, we formulate a secondILP model that generates home-away patterns and assigns them to the teams; we then run the model, whichdetermines the match schedule. Chilean league officials have successfully used the models to schedule all fiveSecond Division tournaments between 2007 and 2010, replacing the random scheduling methodology that theyused previously. Since 2007, the two formulations have been adapted to various formats with which the SecondDivision has experimented; these include a quadruple round robin and a two-phase tournament with zonaland national phases. The application we present is one of a number of such projects that the authors and theircolleagues developed over the past few years, and it represents an expansion of the use of OR techniques formanaging tasks in Chilean soccer.