A FASTER DETERMINISTIC APPROXIMATION ALGORITHM FOR TTP-2

抄録

The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is to minimize the total traveling distance of all teams in a double round-robin tournament. In this paper, we focus on TTP-2, in which each team plays at most two consecutive home games and at most two consecutive away games. For the case where the number of teams n ≡ 2 (mod 4), Zhao and Xiao (2022) presented a (1+5/n)-approximation algorithm. This is a randomized algorithm running in O(n³) time, and its derandomized version runs in O(n⁴) time. In this paper, we present a faster deterministic algorithm running in O(n³) time, with approximation ratio 1+9/n. This ratio improves the previous approximation ratios of the deterministic algorithms with the same time complexity.