Sports Scheduling

League schedules and tournament schedules are two domains of sports scheduling, an active research area within the optimization community. More TV broadcasts and media coverage of sports events have increased the amount of money involved in sports, making high quality, optimized schedules a major concern for key stakeholders.

SINTEF has developed a tool for combined interactive and automated optimization of the scheduling of the topmost football leagues in Norway. SINTEF has assisted NFF (the Norwegian Football Association) in the schedule creations for the seasons 2008 - 2011. The tool is used to satisfy constraints and user preferences, such as creating schedules with a minimum number of breaks, respecting team desires for playing home or away in certain rounds, and so on. Fairness among the teams is the first priority.

SINTEF has also developed an optimization engine for the planning of sport tournaments for the firm Spectare AS. Based on information about fields, teams and matches, the engine generates match schedules assigned start times and fields for the matches. Availability constraints and other constraints are respected, and the engine tries to maximize stated user preferences such as fairness measures (for instance how pauses between matches are distributed among the teams).