Global constraints for round robin tournament scheduling

Abstract

In the presence of side-constraints and optimization criteria, round robin tournament problems are hard combinatorial problems, commonly tackled with tree search and branch-and-bound optimization. Recent results indicate that constraint-based tree search has crucial advantages over integer programming-based tree search for this problem domain by exploiting global constraint propagation algorithms during search. In this paper, we analyze arc-consistent propagation algorithms for the global constraints “all-different” and “one-factor” in the domain of round robin tournaments. The best propagation algorithms allow us to compute all feasible perfectly mirrored pattern sets with minimal breaks for intermural tournaments of realistic size, and to improve known lower bounds for intramural tournaments balanced with respect to carry-over effects.