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Operations Research Techniques for Scheduling Chile's Second Division Soccer League

Author

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  • Guillermo Durán

    (Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matemáticas, Universidad de Chile, 8370439 Santiago, Chile; Instituto de Cálculo and Departamento de Matemática, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Técnicas, 1033 Buenos Aires, Argentina)

  • Mario Guajardo

    (Department of Finance and Management Science, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen 5045, Norway)

  • Rodrigo Wolf-Yadlin

    (Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de Chile, 8370439 Santiago, Chile)

Abstract

In this paper, we use operations research (OR) techniques to schedule the Second Division of the Chilean professional soccer league. The solution must satisfy a series of conditions requested by league officials. Because the teams generally travel long distances by bus, geographical restrictions are particularly important. We specify the scheduling problem and solve it using an integer linear programming (ILP) model that defines when and where each match is played, subject to constraints. For the most difficult instances, we formulate a second ILP model that generates home-away patterns and assigns them to the teams; we then run the model, which determines the match schedule. Chilean league officials have successfully used the models to schedule all five Second Division tournaments between 2007 and 2010, replacing the random scheduling methodology that they used previously. Since 2007, the two formulations have been adapted to various formats with which the Second Division has experimented; these include a quadruple round robin and a two-phase tournament with zonal and national phases. The application we present is one of a number of such projects that the authors and their colleagues developed over the past few years, and it represents an expansion of the use of OR techniques for managing tasks in Chilean soccer.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:42:y:2012:i:3:p:273-285
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.1110.0608
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. G Kendall, 2008. "Scheduling English football fixtures over holiday periods," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 59(6), pages 743-755, June.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Celso C. Ribeiro & Sebastián Urrutia, 2012. "Scheduling the Brazilian Soccer Tournament: Solution Approach and Practice," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 260-272, June.
    5. Dries Goossens & Jeroen Beliën & Frits Spieksma, 2012. "Comparing league formats with respect to match importance in Belgian football," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 194(1), pages 223-240, April.
    6. Dries Goossens & Frits Spieksma, 2009. "Scheduling the Belgian Soccer League," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 39(2), pages 109-118, April.
    7. Flavia Bonomo & Andrés Cardemil & Guillermo Durán & Javier Marenco & Daniela Sabán, 2012. "An Application of the Traveling Tournament Problem: The Argentine Volleyball League," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 245-259, June.
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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. Larson Jeffrey & Johansson Mikael, 2014. "Constructing schedules for sports leagues with divisional and round-robin tournaments," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 10(2), pages 119-129, June.
    5. 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.
    6. 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.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
    9. Christian Ackermann & Felix Hahne & Julia Rieck, 2022. "Matching and Scheduling of Student-Company-Talks for a University IT-Speed Dating Event," SN Operations Research Forum, Springer, vol. 3(3), pages 1-29, September.
    10. 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.

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