Scheduling Social Tournaments

The scheduling of social tournaments has attracted significant attention in recent years, as they arise in many practical applications and induce highly combinatorial problems. This research proposes a high-level modeling of social tournaments and a local search algorithm for finding solutions to the models. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on three classes of applications: social golfer problems, debating tournaments, and judge assignements. In particular, the approach quickly solves real-life debating tournament and judge assignment problems that were open so far.