CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This article describes the optimization process used to schedule the First Divisionof Argentina?s professional volleyball league. The teams in the league are grouped intocouples and matches are held on Thursdays and Saturdays. In every pair of consecutiveThursday-Saturday matches, the two teams in each couple play against two teams fromanother couple. Minimization of travel distances is critical since the teams? home locationsare scattered throughout the country and teams do not return their home sites betweenconsecutive away matches, making this problem a variation of the well-known travelingtournament problem. The coupled format gives rise to two key decisions: (a) how tocouple the teams and (b) how to schedule the matches. We apply integer programmingtechniques and a tabu search heuristic to solve these issues. The resulting scheduleshave been successfully used in the 2007-2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011 leagueseasons, reducing the total travel distance while meeting all of the teams? requirements.This is the first reported application of the traveling tournament problem to a real-worldsports league in the optimization literature.