Scheduling the Italian Football League: an ILP-based approach

Scheduling the Italian Major Football League (the so-called ‘Serie A’) consists in finding for that league a double round robin tournament schedule that takes into account both typical requirements such as conditions on home–away matches and specific requests of the Italian Football Association such as twin-schedules for teams belonging to the same home-town. In this paper, we present a solution procedure able to derive feasible schedules that are also balanced with respect to additional cable television requirements. This procedure adapts the recent approach by Nemhauser and Trick to schedule a College Basketball Conference that considers however only half of the teams involved here. The proposed procedure is divided into three phases: phase 1 generates a pattern set respecting the cable television requirements and several other constraints; phase 2 produces a feasible round robin schedule compatible with the above pattern set; finally, phase 3 generates the actual calendar assigning the teams to the patterns. The procedure allows to generate within short time several different reasonable calendars satisfying the cable television companies requirements and satisfying various other operational constraints while minimizing the total number of violations on the home–away matches conditions.