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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2025.37

Multi-League Sports Scheduling with Team Interdependencies: An Optimization Model

Authors: Nils Weidmann

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 340, 31st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2025)

Abstract

Every year, a large number of matches must be scheduled for professional and amateur sports teams. Several constraints have to be considered, including the overall capacity of venues and interdependencies between teams of the same club. As interdependent teams of a club play in different leagues, finding an optimal solution is very challenging for practitioners. While the problem of respecting capacity restrictions is well-addressed in prior work, interdependencies between teams are widely neglected, despite being a problem of major importance in practice. This paper enhances the formal definition of the multi-league-sports scheduling problem to take team interdependencies into account. We create an optimization problem to be solved by means of integer linear programming, and prove the corresponding decision problem to be NP-complete by a polynomial reduction from 3-SAT. An implementation which was used to schedule German table tennis leagues of a certain district demonstrates the practical applicability of the approach.

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Nils Weidmann. Multi-League Sports Scheduling with Team Interdependencies: An Optimization Model. In 31st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 340, pp. 37:1-37:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{weidmann:LIPIcs.CP.2025.37,
  author =	{Weidmann, Nils},
  title =	{{Multi-League Sports Scheduling with Team Interdependencies: An Optimization Model}},
  booktitle =	{31st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2025)},
  pages =	{37:1--37:19},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-380-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{340},
  editor =	{de la Banda, Maria Garcia},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2025.37},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238986},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2025.37},
  annote =	{Keywords: sports scheduling, linear optimization, constraint programming}
}

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Multi-League Sports Scheduling with Team Interdependencies: An Optimization Model

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