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The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP-$k$) is a well-known benchmark problem in tournament timetabling, which asks us to design a double round-robin schedule such that the total traveling distance of all $n$ teams is minimized under the…
In some domestic professional sports leagues, the home stadiums are located in cities connected by a common train line running in one direction. For these instances, we can incorporate this geographical information to determine optimal or…
This paper considers scheduling on identical machines. The scheduling objective considered in this paper generalizes most scheduling minimization problems. In the problem, there are $n$ jobs and each job $j$ is associated with a…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
The bipartite traveling tournament problem (BTTP) addresses inter-league sports scheduling, which aims to design a feasible bipartite tournament between two $n$-team leagues under some constraints such that the total traveling distance of…
The orienteering problem is a well-studied and fundamental problem in transportation science. In the problem, we are given a graph with prizes on the nodes and lengths on the edges, together with a budget on the overall tour length. The…
The group draw of a sports tournament requires assigning teams to groups of (almost) the same size. The most important criteria for a draw procedure are balance, randomness, and transparency, which could not be satisfied simultaneously if…
If $T$ is an $n$-vertex tournament with a given number of $3$-cycles, what can be said about the number of its $4$-cycles? The most interesting range of this problem is where $T$ is assumed to have $c\cdot n^3$ cyclic triples for some $c>0$…
In a round-robin tournament, a team may lack the incentive to win if its final rank does not depend on the outcome of the matches still to be played. This paper introduces a classification scheme to determine these weakly (where one team is…
We study the minimum backlog problem (MBP). This online problem arises, e.g., in the context of sensor networks. We focus on two main variants of MBP. The discrete MBP is a 2-person game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The player is initially…
We consider planning problems for graphs, Markov decision processes (MDPs), and games on graphs. While graphs represent the most basic planning model, MDPs represent interaction with nature and games on graphs represent interaction with an…
Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…
The assignment of personnel to teams is a fundamental and ubiquitous managerial function, typically involving several objectives and a variety of idiosyncratic practical constraints. Despite the prevalence of this task in practice, the…
The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is to minimize the total traveling distance of all teams in a double round-robin tournament. In this paper, we focus on TTP-2, in which each team plays at most two consecutive home games and at most…
In this paper we address the problem of designing an interruptible system in a setting in which $n$ problem instances, all equally important, must be solved concurrently. The system involves scheduling executions of contract algorithms…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We consider scheduling problems for unit jobs with release times, where the number or size of the gaps in the schedule is taken into consideration, either in the objective function or as a constraint. Except for a few papers on energy…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
Tournament solutions provide methods for selecting the "best" alternatives from a tournament and have found applications in a wide range of areas. Previous work has shown that several well-known tournament solutions almost never rule out…
The orienteering problem is a route optimization problem which consists in finding a simple cycle that maximizes the total collected profit subject to a maximum distance limitation. In the last few decades, the occurrence of this problem in…