Algorithms and Software for the Golf Director Problem

Abstract

The golf director problem is a sports management problem that aims to find an allocation of golf players into fair teams for certain golf club competitions. The motivation for fairness as the objective is that club golf competitions are recreational events for which the golf director needs to form teams that are competitive even though they consist of players with different skill levels measured by their USGA (http://www.usga.org) or R&A (http://www.randa.org) handicaps. We formalize the concept of “fairness" of allocation of players into teams playing 18-hole golf games and argue that finding an optimal assignment of players to teams is intractable for even the fastest computers. Instead, we provide an efficient simulation and optimization-based procedure that finds a near-optimal fair team allocation. Computational tests show the approach to be better than standard methods. A computer implementation of the solution method is publicly available and located at http://www.fairgolfteams.com. The website provides a golf director with a variety of controls to manage and run club golf competitions in a fair way. This is described in the appendix.