Constraint satisfaction for requirement handling of football fixture lists

The Fixture Lists for the Dutch Professional Football League are constructed based on a so called clustering method. This approach consists of three basic steps of which the division of the requirements of the League into hard demands and soft wishes is rather important. Such a division is needed because the scheduling of over-determined due to conflicting interests of the parties involved and quality demands. A computer program for fast and directed switches between those two types of requirements is not yet realised. Research is carried out to use Constraint Satisfaction, more specific Constraint Logic Programming, to this extent based on commercial available software packages such as CHIP (Constraint Satisfaction In Prolog). The conclusions of our investigations are that these kind of packages supply correct answers for a given set of hard and medium requirements in a reasonable amount of time. However, using such an approach in an overall, fast, robust and reliable Decision Support System for Fixture List construction is still a long way to go. The power of constraint logic programming is that it uses consistency techniques which reduces the solution space. The introduction of the domain concept, techniques and syntax derived from it, is one of the assets of CHIP with respect to Prolog.