An Ant Based Hyper-heuristic for the Travelling Tournament Problem

The travelling tournament problem is a challenging sports timetabling problem which is widely believed to be NP-hard. The objective is to establish a feasible double round robin tournament schedule, with minimum travel distances. This paper investigates the application of an ant based hyper-heuristic algorithm for this problem. Ant algorithms, a well known meta-heuristic, have been successfully applied to various problems. Whilst hyper-heuristics are an emerging technology, which operate at a higher level of abstraction than meta-heuristics. This paper presents a framework which employs ant algorithms as a hyper-heuristic. We show that this approach produces good quality solutions for the traveling tournament problem when compared with results from the literature