A Tiling Approach for Fast Implementation of the Traveling Tournament Problem

Sports in society today are played by millions of individuals at the professional, scholastic and amateur levels. The success of the leagues and tournaments often lies in the ability to generate a “good” schedule. Each league or tournament has a variety of constraints and objective measures to be used in the determination of a good schedule. Availability of venues, the order of opponents, travel time and distance are but of a few of the myriad of issues considered by the sports league scheduler. The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP), documented by Easton et al. in [4], describes a typical sports scheduling challenge. Specific instances and records can be found in [14]. The TTP is a double round robin tournament to be played by n teams over (2n-2) periods or weeks, where each team plays every period (we do not consider the “mirrored” version of the problem). Three unique constraints of the TTP are: