Feasible Home-Away Table Construction with Minimal Breaks and Team Assignment for Scheduling a Tournament

—Scheduling for J1 League 2018—

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach to schedule a double round-robin tournament. In the first stage, we create a home-away table (HAT) satisfying basic round-robin constraints with minimal breaks, as well as some constraints to improve the enjoyment of matches. In the second stage, we aim to find an assignment in which each team is assigned to exactly one row of the HAT generated, considering the total travel distance for each team. Finally, we show that the approach proposed successfully generates a yearly schedule for J1.League.