A constraint programming approach to the multiple-venue, sport-scheduling problem

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling sports competitions over several venues which are not associated with any of the competitors. A two-phase, constraint programming approach is developed, first identifying a solution that designates the participants and schedules each of the competitions, then assigning each competitor as the ‘home’ or the ‘away’ team. Computational experiments are conducted and the results are compared with an integer goal programming approach. The constraint programming approach achieves optimal solutions for problems with up to sixteen teams, and near-optimal solutions for problems with up to thirty teams.