Scheduling an amateur cricket league over a nine-year period

Abstract

This paper describes a scheduling exercise carried out for the Minor Counties’ Cricket Association (MCCA), which runs an amateur league-based across England. The MCCA League consists of two wholly separate divisions of 10 teams each, with each team playing three home matches and three away matches against teams in their own division each year, with opponents rotating between years; effectively this was scheduled as a double round robin over a three-year period. Originally the schedules had been repeated on a three-year cycle. However, problems of fairness and balance between years arose, and the MCCA, therefore, decided they needed to commission the creation of a nine-year schedule – a sextuple round robin – which would address these equity issues and others. These issues were formulated as soft constraints, some of which related to a nine-year period, and a schedule was successfully produced using a form of Simulated Annealing, operating over a variety of neighbourhoods. The new nine-year schedule is currently in operation.