Related papers: A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA Wor…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
The team formation problem assumes a set of experts and a task, where each expert has a set of skills and the task requires some skills. The objective is to find a set of experts that maximizes coverage of the required skills while…
Single-elimination tournaments are the standard paradigm both for the main tennis professional associations. Schedules are generated by allocating first seeded and then unseeded players with seeds prevented from encountering each other…
The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem that has attracted the interest of researchers around the world. This paper proposes an improved search neighbourhood for the TTP that has been…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
We present a method for pursuit/evasion that is highly efficient and and scales to large teams of aircraft. The underlying algorithm is an efficient algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that supports fully continuous state…
We consider the problem of routing for logistics purposes, in a contested environment where an adversary attempts to disrupt the vehicle along the chosen route. We construct a game-theoretic model that captures the problem of optimal…
In this work we study the ranking algorithm used by F\'ed\'eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA); we analyze the parameters it currently uses, show the formal probabilistic model from which it can be derived, and optimize…
We study the online multi-class selection problem with group fairness guarantees, where limited resources must be allocated to sequentially arriving agents. Our work addresses two key limitations in the existing literature. First, we…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
Team captains Alice and Bob divide up $2m$ footballers, each reduced to a real-valued score, into two teams of $m$ footballers each. On each turn, one captain plays picker, and the other chooser: the picker names a footballer yet to be…
In this article, we present the development of a two-step optimization framework to deal with the design and selection of aircraft departure routes and the allocation of flights among these routes. The aim of the framework is to minimize…
Background: We estimate the overall quality of response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the first 18 months, using a small number of known parameters and a proposed method that is reasonably robust to the uncertainties in the data. Methods: The…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
We analysed the distribution of the number of goals scored in each of the 51 football matches played in the UEFA EURO 2020 final phase as well as the waiting times between scores (also considering censored times). We found that the Poisson…
Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a…
Winning the coin toss at the end of a tied soccer game gives a team the right to choose whether to kick either first or second on all five rounds of penalty kicks, when each team is allowed one kick per round. There is considerable evidence…
It is pointed out that separability problem for arbitrary multi-partite states can be fully solved by a finite size, elementary recursive algorithm. In the worse case scenario, the underlying numerical procedure, may grow doubly…
We study a new formulation of the team-formation problem, where the goal is to form teams to work on a given set of tasks requiring different skills. Deviating from the classic problem setting where one is asking to cover all skills of each…