Scheduling Umpire Crews for Professional Tennis Tournaments

Abstract

Professional tennis organizations, such as the United States Tennis Association (USTA), the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the International Tennis Federation (ITF), and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), host tennis tournaments throughout the world. At these tournaments, chief umpires assign and schedule line umpires for every match. For most tournaments, they perform this task manually, which can be cumbersome for large tournaments. For large tournaments, such as the US Open, they can use software developed to facilitate scheduling. Unfortunately, the software package currently available often creates suboptimal or infeasible schedules that must be manually adjusted. We developed a program based on optimization that automates the scheduling procedure. Our program consistently provides high-quality schedules in as little as 25 percent of the time taken with other methods.