THE APPLICATION OF GOAL PROGRAMMING TO THE SCHEDULING PROBLEM OF THE PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUE

Abstract

ABSTRACT In professional baseball sport, game scheduling is one of the most important routine jobs for a sporting league. The quality of annual game schedule directly affects the income of ticket sales and the operational costs of baseball teams. In Taiwan, the most commonly used “host and guest” scheduling principle in professional sports is not applicable, because the most profitable ticket sales concentrate on some metropolitan areas and the fans do not have obvious geographical preferences. For this reason, the game schedule of professional baseball league in Taiwan is mostly determined according to ticket sales as the major factor, to equitability between teams, and to equitability between different areas or cities. Therefore the scheduling models developed in other countries cannot be applied in the game schedule of Taiwan professional baseball league. This study develops a game scheduling model for Taiwan professional baseball league based on goal programming technique. Real data from Taiwan professional baseball games have been used to test the performance of the proposed model. The test shows that the proposed model is effective and efficient.