Kicking timetabling problems into touch – scheduling the 1999 Rugby World Cup

The schedule for the 1999 Rugby Union World Cup had to satisfy the Organising Committee, various Rugby Unions and several television companies as well as being fair to all the competing teams. Consequently producing the schedule was a complex multi-objective problem and a meta-heuristic based approach was envisaged; however an intensive analysis of the problem led to a satisfactory schedule being produced using manual methods. This schedule was compared with solutions generated using tabu search, with the World Cup organisers preferring the manual solution. Thus some apparently complicated problems may not be as difficult as they first seem.