An Efficient Simulated Annealing Approach to the Travelling Tournament Problem

Sevnaz Nourollahi, Kourosh Eshghi, Hooshmand Shokri Razaghi

Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Faculty of department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

DOI: 10.4236/ajor.2012.23047                

Abstract

Scheduling sports leagues has drawn significant attention to itself in recent years, as it involves considerable revenue as well as challenging combinatorial optimization problems. A particular class of these problems is the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) which focuses on minimizing the total traveling distance for teams. In this paper, an efficient simulated annealing approach is presented for TTP which applies two simultaneous and disparate models for the problem in order to search the solutions space more effectively. Also, a computationally efficient modified greedy scheme is proposed for constructing a favorable initial solution for the simulated annealing algorithm. Our computational experiments, carried out on standard instances, demonstrate that this approach competes with previous offered methods in quality of found solutions and their computational time.

Keywords

Travelling Tournament Problem; Simulated Annealing; Graph Coloring; Combinatorial Optimization

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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