IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orinte/v37y2007i2p187-196.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.1060.0259
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/inte.1060.0259?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. Bernardo Nicoletti, 1975. "Automatic Crew Rostering," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 9(1), pages 33-42, February.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    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. 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.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    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. 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.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jesica Armas & Luis Cadarso & Angel A. Juan & Javier Faulin, 2017. "A multi-start randomized heuristic for real-life crew rostering problems in airlines with work-balancing goals," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 258(2), pages 825-848, November.
    2. Simona Mancini, 2018. "Assignment of swimmers to events in a multi-team meeting for team global performance optimization," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 264(1), pages 325-337, May.
    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. M B Wright, 2007. "Case study: problem formulation and solution for a real-world sports scheduling problem," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 58(4), pages 439-445, April.
    5. M B Wright, 2009. "50 years of OR in sport," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 60(1), pages 161-168, May.
    6. Ernst, A. T. & Jiang, H. & Krishnamoorthy, M. & Sier, D., 2004. "Staff scheduling and rostering: A review of applications, methods and models," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 153(1), pages 3-27, February.
    7. Li, Miao & Davari, Morteza & Goossens, Dries, 2023. "Multi-league sports scheduling with different leagues sizes," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 307(1), pages 313-327.
    8. Maenhout, Broos & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2010. "A hybrid scatter search heuristic for personalized crew rostering in the airline industry," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 206(1), pages 155-167, October.
    9. Russell, Robert A. & Urban, Timothy L., 2010. "Multicriteria models for planning power-networking events," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 207(1), pages 83-91, November.
    10. Gang Yu & Michael Argüello & Gao Song & Sandra M. McCowan & Anna White, 2003. "A New Era for Crew Recovery at Continental Airlines," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 33(1), pages 5-22, February.
    11. Guo, Yufeng & Mellouli, Taieb & Suhl, Leena & Thiel, Markus P., 2006. "A partially integrated airline crew scheduling approach with time-dependent crew capacities and multiple home bases," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 171(3), pages 1169-1181, June.
    12. 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.
    13. Jari Kyngäs & Kimmo Nurmi & Nico Kyngäs & George Lilley & Thea Salter & Dries Goossens, 2017. "Scheduling the Australian Football League," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 68(8), pages 973-982, August.
    14. Philippe Racette & Frédéric Quesnel & Andrea Lodi & François Soumis, 2024. "Gaining insight into crew rostering instances through ML-based sequential assignment," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 32(3), pages 537-578, October.
    15. Eltoukhy, Abdelrahman E.E. & Wang, Z.X. & Chan, Felix T.S. & Fu, X., 2019. "Data analytics in managing aircraft routing and maintenance staffing with price competition by a Stackelberg-Nash game model," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 143-168.
    16. David Van Bulck & Dries Goossens & Jo¨rn Scho¨nberger & Mario Guajardo, 2020. "An Instance Data Repository for the Round-robin Sports Timetabling Problem," Management and Labour Studies, XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business Management & Human Resources, vol. 45(2), pages 184-200, May.
    17. Panta Lučić & Dušan Teodorović, 2007. "Metaheuristics approach to the aircrew rostering problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 155(1), pages 311-338, November.
    18. Schönberger, Jörn, 2015. "Scheduling of Sport League Systems with Inter-League Constraints," Discussion Papers 2/2015, Technische Universität Dresden, "Friedrich List" Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences, Institute of Transport and Economics.
    19. Knust, Sigrid, 2010. "Scheduling non-professional table-tennis leagues," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 200(2), pages 358-367, January.
    20. Nishi, Tatsushi & Sugiyama, Taichi & Inuiguchi, Masahiro, 2014. "Two-level decomposition algorithm for crew rostering problems with fair working condition," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 237(2), pages 465-473.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:37:y:2007:i:2:p:187-196. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.