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Scheduling Umpire Crews for Professional Tennis Tournaments

Author

Listed:
  • Adam Farmer

    (Culverhouse College of Business, University of Alabama, Box 870226, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0226)

  • Jeffrey S. Smith

    (College of Engineering, Auburn University, 207 Dunstan Hall, Auburn, Alabama 36849)

  • Luke T. Miller

    (School of Business Administration, Fort Lewis College, 1000 Rim Drive, Durango, Colorado 81301)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Adam Farmer & Jeffrey S. Smith & Luke T. Miller, 2007. "Scheduling Umpire Crews for Professional Tennis Tournaments," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 37(2), pages 187-196, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:37:y:2007:i:2:p:187-196
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.1060.0259
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bernardo Nicoletti, 1975. "Automatic Crew Rostering," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 9(1), pages 33-42, February.
    2. Urban, Timothy L. & Russell, Robert A., 2003. "Scheduling sports competitions on multiple venues," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 148(2), pages 302-311, July.
    3. Schonberger, J. & Mattfeld, D. C. & Kopfer, H., 2004. "Memetic Algorithm timetabling for non-commercial sport leagues," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 153(1), pages 102-116, February.
    4. Lucic, Panta & Teodorovic, Dusan, 1999. "Simulated annealing for the multi-objective aircrew rostering problem," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 19-45, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Lamghari, Amina & Ferland, Jacques A., 2011. "Assigning judges to competitions of several rounds using Tabu search," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 210(3), pages 694-705, May.
    2. Özlü, Oğuzhan & Sokol, Joel, 2016. "An optimization approach to designing a baseball scout network," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 255(3), pages 948-960.
    3. Mancini Simona & Isabello Andrea, 2014. "Fair referee assignment for the Italian soccer serieA," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 10(2), pages 153-160, June.
    4. Trick, Michael A. & Yildiz, Hakan, 2012. "Locally Optimized Crossover for the Traveling Umpire Problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 216(2), pages 286-292.
    5. de Oliveira, Lucas & de Souza, Cid C. & Yunes, Tallys, 2014. "Improved bounds for the traveling umpire problem: A stronger formulation and a relax-and-fix heuristic," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 236(2), pages 592-600.
    6. Michael A. Trick & Hakan Yildiz & Tallys Yunes, 2012. "Scheduling Major League Baseball Umpires and the Traveling Umpire Problem," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 232-244, June.
    7. J. Paul Brooks, 2012. "The Court of Appeals of Virginia Uses Integer Programming and Cloud Computing to Schedule Sessions," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(6), pages 544-553, December.
    8. Federico Della Croce & Gabriele Dragotto & Rosario Scatamacchia, 2022. "On fairness and diversification in WTA and ATP tennis tournaments generation," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 316(2), pages 1107-1119, September.
    9. Wauters, Tony & Van Malderen, Sam & Vanden Berghe, Greet, 2014. "Decomposition and local search based methods for the traveling umpire problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 238(3), pages 886-898.
    10. Marjorie Cone Saur & Kaleigh Starr & Mark Husted & Alexandra M. Newman, 2012. "Scheduling Softball Series in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 296-309, June.
    11. Michael A. Trick & Hakan Yildiz, 2011. "Benders' cuts guided large neighborhood search for the traveling umpire problem," Naval Research Logistics (NRL), John Wiley & Sons, vol. 58(8), pages 771-781, December.

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