A Benders approach for the constrained minimum break problem

This paper presents a hybrid IP/CP algorithm for designing a double round robin schedule with a minimal number of breaks. Both mirrored and non-mirrored schedules with and without place constraints are considered. The algorithm uses Benders cuts to obtain feasible home–away pattern sets in few iterations and this approach leads to significant reductions in computation time for hard instances. Furthermore, the algorithm is capable of solving a number of previously unsolved benchmark problems for the Traveling Tournament Problem with constant distances.