A fair allocation of county cricket opponents

Each team in the English County Cricket Championship plays against some other teams twice a year, and others only once. This paper describes a case study whose aim was to overcome this inherent unfairness by producing a four-year schedule of opponents which was as fair as possible, and could be easily seen to be fair, while still allowing for traditional rivalries. The schedule also needed to be satisfactory in regard to several other constraints and objectives. Various simple heuristics were used; these are described in some detail. Of particular interest is the effectiveness of a ‘local non-worsening’ approach when the objective is to find any feasible solution. This is equivalent to simulated annealing at a constant temperature of absolute zero.