Track: Operations Research

Abstract

Sports scheduling has become an important and difficult research problem in recent years. Deciding which teams will play on which pitch and at what time is a challenge to sports administrators because it requires the achievement of fairness accounting for various factors that affect stakeholders. This paper proposes an integer programming model for the problem of determining the optimal matchday schedule for an entire season of Turkish Super League under two fairness criteria. The objective is to ensure that team-specific matchday distributions are as uniform as possible. We model the problem as a nonlinear binary integer program. Deviations from ideal matchday assignments obtained through the optimal schedule are compared with those of manual schedules constructed by the Turkish Football Federation. The results indicate that seasonal fixture can be significantly improved by implementing the optimal schedule.