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Case study - Optimal Planning Solutions
Optimal Planning Solutions has recently had several big wins using Xpress-MP for Sports Scheduling
Optimal Planning Solutions specializes in providing optimization-based scheduling services to professional sports leagues and has developed a revolutionary new approach to sports league scheduling. They use Xpress-MP--based solvers to analyze every possible scheduling alternative to ensure that the resulting schedule is the one that best matches a clientﾃﾔ customized objectives and constraints. Based on clientsﾃ…ustomized objectives, Optimal Planning Solutions can create schedules to:
- Maximize preferred venue dates
- Accommodate television network packages
- Meet specific team request for venue dates and/or opponents
- Minimize travel costs or days on road
- Minimize the frequency of consecutive home (or road) games
- Achieve a fair or balanced schedule
In one particular schedule generated for a football league, 224 games needed to be scheduled over a period of 17 weeks. This league contains 28 teams (4 divisions of 7).
The Scheduling Objectives and Constraints of the problem were as follows:
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| Scheduling Objectives |
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Scheduling Constraints |
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| 1. |
Minimize travel requirements |
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1. |
Venue availability by team |
| 2. |
Minimize occurrence of 3 consecutive home games |
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2. |
League requested games for home openers |
| 3. |
Minimize occurrence of 3 consecutive road games |
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3. |
Teams must play each division rival twice (home/away) |
| 4. |
Ensure that the geographically isolated teams are not burdened with excessive travel |
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4. |
Games between divisional rivals must be at least 4 weeks apart |
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5. |
Teams cannot play 4 consecutive home/bye or 4 consecutive road/bye games |
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6. |
Teams may not travel more than 11,000 miles over the course of the season |
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The outcome of the Optimal Planning Solution schedule was as follows:
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| Objectives |
League-Generated
Schedule |
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Improvement |
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| 1) Total travel (miles) |
209,606 |
185,760 |
11% decrease |
| 2) Teams playing 3 in a row at home |
10 |
4 |
60% decrease |
| 3) Teams playing 3 in a row on road |
7 |
4 |
43% decrease |
| 4) Maximum single team travel (miles) |
13,268 |
10,870 |
18% decrease |
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Over the past year, Optimal Planning Solutions has created optimized Season Schedules for: Major League Soccer (MLS), Arena Football League (AFL), Arena Football2 (AF2), Canadian Football League (CFL), National Rugby League (NRL ﾋ、ustralia), National Basketball League (NBL - Australia), Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL), Northern League (NL), United Hockey League (UHL), and Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL).
When asked about Optimal Planning Solutions, Brad Pursel, Sr. Director ﾋ。roadcasting and Game Operations for Major League Soccer said:
"Creating Major League Soccer's game schedule is undoubtedly one of the most complex, challenging and important undertakings each year. Optimal Planning Solutions understood this from the beginning and helped simplify the process and maximize the schedule's potential whilst considering travel constraints, key match-ups, overall balance and much more. Optimal Planning Solutions were very responsive, thorough and service oriented. Major League Soccer gladly endorses Optimal Planning Solutions schedule making services as they are not fully satisfied until you are fully satisfied."
For more information about Dash Optimization contact:
Alkis Vazacopoulos
560 Sylvan Avenue
Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632
www.dashoptimization.com
For more information about Optimal Planning Solutions contact:
Rick Stone
rickstone@optimalplanning.com
Suite 206 ﾋ��2411 Hwy 6
Vernon, BC, Canada V1T 5G4
www.optimalplanning.com
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