An application of the traveling tournament problem: The Argentine volleyball league

BONOMO, FLAVIA; CARDEMIL, ANDRÉS; DURÁN, GUILLERMO; MARENCO, JAVIER; SABÁN, DANIELA

INTERFACES

INFORMS

Año: 2012 vol. 42 p. 245 - 259

0092-2102

This article describes the optimization process used to schedule the First Division of Argentina´s professional volleyball league. The teams in the league are grouped into couples and matches are held on Thursdays and Saturdays. In every pair of consecutive Thursday-Saturday matches, the two teams in each couple play against two teams from another couple. Minimization of travel distances is critical since the teams´ home locations are scattered throughout the country and teams do not return their home sites between consecutive away matches, making this problem a variation of the well-known traveling tournament problem. The coupled format gives rise to two key decisions: (a) how to couple the teams and (b) how to schedule the matches. We apply integer programming techniques and a tabu search heuristic to solve these issues. The resulting schedules have been successfully used in the 2007-2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011 league seasons, 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-world sports league in the optimization literature.