Scheduling a major college basketball conference – revisited

Nemhauser and Trick presented the problem of finding a timetable for the 1997/1998 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) in basketball. Their solution, found with a combination of integer programming and exhaustive enumeration, was accepted by the ACC. Finite-domain constraint programming is another programming technique that can be used for solving combinatorial search problems such as sports tournament scheduling. This paper presents a solution of round-robin tournament planning based on finite-domain constraint programming. The approach yields a dramatic performance improvement, which makes an integrated interactive software solution feasible.