Minimizing Travels by Maximizing Breaks in Round Robin Tournament Schedules

We investigate the relation between two aspects of round robin tournament scheduling problems: breaks and distances. We show that the breaks maximization problem and the distance minimiza- tion problem are equivalent for a new class of uniform problem instances. This relation is used to prove the optimality of solutions found by a heuristic to the mirrored traveling tournament problem. The uniform instances solved to optimality are the largest solved to date and shed some light on the complexity of this problem.