Sports scheduling for not all pairs of teams
Abstract
We consider the following sports scheduling problem. Consider teams in a sport league. Each pair of teams must play exactly one match in days. That is, games are held simultaneously in a day. We want to make a schedule which has games for days. When we make a schedule, the schedule must satisfy a constraint according to the HAP table, which designates a home game or an away game for each team and each date. Two teams cannot play against each other unless one team is assigned to a home game and the other team is assigned to an away game. Recently, D. Briskorn proposed a necessary condition for a HAP table to have a proper schedule. And he proposed a conjecture that such a condition is also sufficient. That is, if a solution to the linear inequalities exists, they must have an integral solution. In this paper, we rewrite his conjecture by using perfect matchings. We consider a monoid in the affine space generated by perfect matchings. In terms of the Hilbert basis of such a monoid, the problem is naturally generalized to a scheduling problem for not all pairs of teams described by a regular graph. In this paper, we show a regular graph such that the corresponding linear inequalities have a solution but do not have any integral solution. Moreover we discuss for which regular graphs the statement generalizing the conjecture holds.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0809.3682,
title = {Sports scheduling for not all pairs of teams},
author = {Kenji Kashiwabara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.3682},
year = {2008}
}