Mathematical modeling and tabu search heuristic for the traveling tournament problem

Abstract

As professional sports have become big businesses all over the world, many researches with respect to sports scheduling problem have been worked over the last two decades. The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is defined as minimizing total traveling distance for all teams in the league. In this study, a mathematical model for the TTP is presented. This model is formulated using an integer programming (IP). In order to solve practical problems with large size of teams, a tabu search heuristic is suggested. Also, the concepts of alternation and intimacy were introduced for effective neighborhood search. Experiments with several instances are tested to evaluate their performances. It was shown that the proposed heuristic shows good performances with computational efficiency.