The 34th IPP Symposium
Optimization in Sports Scheduling
George L. Nemhauser, Georgia Institute of Technology
University and professional sports, including basketball, baseball, football and hockey, is a multibillion-dollar business with a substantial part of the revenue derived from television. To maximize revenue, it is crucial to have important games televised on the right days and times. These requirements frequently conflict with more traditional requirements of a "fair" schedule that balances strength of schedule, home and away games, and travel. Sports scheduling can be thought of as "the engineering of the sports entertainment supply chain". A typical model for a sports scheduling problem is a combinatorial design with nasty side constraints and multi-objectives. In this talk, we use our work in scheduling ACC basketball and major league baseball to illustrate the models, the difficulty in solving them and the results.
