M. A. Trick, “Michael Trick’s Guide to Sports Scheduling”. http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/TOURN/

has been cited by the following article:

• TITLE: An Efficient Simulated Annealing Approach to the Travelling Tournament Problem

  AUTHORS: Sevnaz Nourollahi, Kourosh Eshghi, Hooshmand Shokri Razaghi

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

  JOURNAL NAME: American Journal of Operations Research, Vol.2 No.3, September 19, 2012

  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.