Scheduling a professional sports league in Microsoft® Excel: Showing students the value of good modeling and solution techniques

Scheduling a sports league to minimize travel is a notoriously difficult task involving the coordinated solutions of multiple traveling salesperson problems (TSP) with additional constraints. Good modeling techniques can, however, sometimes reduce these problems to manageable sizes. This paper describes the use of a case based on Major League Soccer that illustrates that an extremely difficult optimization problem can be reduced to a sequential optimization problem that yields a globally minimal travel schedule. Each step of the optimization procedure uses spreadsheet software. The case illustrates TSP solution methodology, column generation techniques, and integer programming formulations.