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Scheduling the Brazilian Soccer Tournament: Solution Approach and Practice

Author

Listed:
  • Celso C. Ribeiro

    (Department of Computer Science, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, RJ 22431-240, Brazil)

  • Sebastián Urrutia

    (Department of Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG 31270, Brazil)

Abstract

Sports, with their massive investments in players and structures, have become a big business. Professional and amateur leagues face challenging problems, including logistics, revenue maximization, broadcast rights, fairness issues, game attractiveness, and security. The annual Brazilian soccer tournament is a compact, mirrored double round-robin tournament played by 20 teams in each of its two main divisions; it is possibly the world's most attractive soccer tournament because of the quality of the teams and players in the competition. With substantial revenue and community pride on the line, devising optimal schedules is crucial to players, teams, fans, sponsors, cities, and for security issues. Fair and balanced schedules for all teams are a major issue for ensuring attractiveness and confidence in the tournament outcome. The organizers seek schedules that satisfy a number of constraints. As often as possible, the most important games should be played in weekend rounds so that the open TV channels can broadcast many attractive games. We describe the integer programming formulation of the scheduling problem and the three-phase decomposition approach we proposed for solving it. We also report on the practical experience we observed after two years of running the system and the main results achieved during its successful history.

Suggested Citation

  • Celso C. Ribeiro & Sebastián Urrutia, 2012. "Scheduling the Brazilian Soccer Tournament: Solution Approach and Practice," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 260-272, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:42:y:2012:i:3:p:260-272
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.1110.0566
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Rasmussen, Rasmus V. & Trick, Michael A., 2008. "Round robin scheduling - a survey," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 188(3), pages 617-636, August.
    2. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Jaime Miranda & Denis Sauré & Sebastián Souyris & Andres Weintraub & Rodrigo Wolf, 2007. "Scheduling the Chilean Soccer League by Integer Programming," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 37(6), pages 539-552, December.
    3. Dries Goossens & Frits Spieksma, 2009. "Scheduling the Belgian Soccer League," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 39(2), pages 109-118, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Facundo Gutiérrez, 2022. "Efficient referee assignment in Argentinean professional basketball leagues using operations research methods," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 316(2), pages 1121-1139, September.
    2. Guillermo Durán, 2021. "Sports scheduling and other topics in sports analytics: a survey with special reference to Latin America," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 29(1), pages 125-155, April.
    3. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Facundo Gutiérrez & Javier Marenco & Denis Sauré & Gonzalo Zamorano, 2021. "Scheduling the Main Professional Football League of Argentina," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 51(5), pages 361-372, September.
    4. Ahmed Ghoniem & Agha Iqbal Ali & Mohammed Al-Salem & Wael Khallouli, 2017. "Prescriptive analytics for FIFA World Cup lodging capacity planning," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 68(10), pages 1183-1194, October.
    5. Fernando Alarcón & Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Jaime Miranda & Hugo Muñoz & Luis Ramírez & Mario Ramírez & Denis Sauré & Matías Siebert & Sebastián Souyris & Andrés Weintraub & Rodrigo Wolf-Yad, 2017. "Operations Research Transforms the Scheduling of Chilean Soccer Leagues and South American World Cup Qualifiers," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 47(1), pages 52-69, February.
    6. Michael J. Fry & Jeffrey W. Ohlmann, 2012. "Introduction to the Special Issue on Analytics in Sports, Part II: Sports Scheduling Applications," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 229-231, June.
    7. Van Bulck, David & Goossens, Dries & Clarner, Jan-Patrick & Dimitsas, Angelos & Fonseca, George H.G. & Lamas-Fernandez, Carlos & Lester, Martin Mariusz & Pedersen, Jaap & Phillips, Antony E. & Rosati,, 2024. "Which algorithm to select in sports timetabling?," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 318(2), pages 575-591.
    8. Durán, Guillermo & Guajardo, Mario & Sauré, Denis, 2017. "Scheduling the South American Qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup by integer programming," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 262(3), pages 1109-1115.
    9. van Doornmalen, Jasper & Hojny, Christopher & Lambers, Roel & Spieksma, Frits C.R., 2023. "Integer programming models for round robin tournaments," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 310(1), pages 24-33.
    10. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Rodrigo Wolf-Yadlin, 2012. "Operations Research Techniques for Scheduling Chile's Second Division Soccer League," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 273-285, June.
    11. Durán, Guillermo & Durán, Santiago & Marenco, Javier & Mascialino, Federico & Rey, Pablo A., 2019. "Scheduling Argentina’s professional basketball leagues: A variation on the Travelling Tournament Problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 275(3), pages 1126-1138.

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