Jip and Sports Scheduling

Session date: 5 February 2024

Session host: Jip Dekker

Summary:

Jip J. Dekker is a researcher from Monash University specialising in modelling optimisation problems. He is one of the main developers of the MiniZinc modelling language, and he has a passion for solving real-world problems.

In this talk he will discuss a method to schedule multi-division sport competitions, where teams from the same club belong to different divisions, but share the same venue. It minimizes capacity violations for each round at every club by balancing home and away games. The system first generates division templates with virtual teams, and then assigns an actual team to each virtual one, augmented by local search techniques in the second stage. Novel in this work is the exploration of alternative templates during the second stage, which make it possible to generate better schedules. Using our local search approach we are able to schedule the Victorian Junior Football League’s 524 teams, each playing 15 games, which makes around 4000 games in all. This is an order of magnitude larger than any tackled in previous published work on this problem.