Optimizing player’s formations for corner-kick situations in RoboCup soccer 2D simulation

Abstract

In the domain of the Soccer simulation 2D league of the RoboCup, appropriate player positioning against the opponent team formation is an important factor of soccer team performance. In this work, we propose to use a meta-heuristic algorithm called the firefly algorithm to optimize player positioning. We used sequential Bayesian estimation as well as parallelization to reduce the necessary number of time-consuming simulated soccer matches. As a first trial of our system, we optimized the corner-kick formation. Preliminary results in optimizing the corner-kick formation are not advantageous over the previous handmade formation due to the difficulty in tuning the meta-heuristic algorithm parameters. However, it is also shown that the proposed system is effective in handling a high load of simulations over the span of weeks and therefore is promising to be usable to optimize player positioning.