| Article ID: | iaor1998273 |
| Country: | Canada |
| Volume: | 35 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 119 |
| End Page Number: | 132 |
| Publication Date: | Aug 1997 |
| Journal: | INFOR |
| Authors: | Kostuk Kent |
| Keywords: | scheduling, timetabling, heuristics, networks, artificial intelligence: decision support |
A common tournament format used for sports such as baseball, tennis and curling is an elimination tournament. In an elimination tournament teams or players are paired. The winners play other winners until a champion is decided. The losers are eliminated from play or go to a consolation event. Designing an elimination tournament for over 100 participants, and multiple consolation events, is an arduous and time consuming task. To eliminate having to deal with this problem for their 176 team, 10 event tournament, the Saskatoon City Men's Bonspiel Committee commissioned the design of a computerized tournament scheduling package. The package was designed in two phases. The first phase was to develop a method to schematically represent a tournament. The second stage was to design a Decision Support System (DSS) based on the schematic representation. The objective of the DSS was to assist an inexperienced scheduler to develop a tournament draw given a specified number of entries and available playing surfaces. Once implemented, a task which had taken an expert several weeks to complete now took minutes on a desktop PC. In addition, the data management capabilities of the DSS reduced the required number of administrative volunteers from five to two.