Semidefinite programming based approaches to the break minimization problem

This paper deals with the break minimization problem of sports scheduling. The problem is to find a stadium assignment that minimizes the total number of breaks under a given round-robin tournament schedule. We show that the problem can be formulated as MAX RES CUT and MAX 2SAT. We also apply Goemans and Williamson’s approximation algorithm based on positive semidefinite programming relaxation. Our computational experiments show that the approximation algorithm finds good solutions in practical computational time.