A hybrid PSO-SA algorithm for the Traveling Tournament Problem

Sports scheduling has become an important area of applied operations research, since satisfying the fans and teams´ requests and revenues of a sports league and TV networks may be affected by the quality of the league schedule. While this type of scheduling problem can be solved theoretically by mathematical methods, it computationally leads to hard problems. The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is defined as minimizing total traveling distance for all teams in the league. In this study, a new mathematical model for the TTP with no-repeater constraint is presented. In addition, a very fast hybrid metaheuristic algorithm is proposed, which combines particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simulated annealing (SA). Our computational experiments on standard instances show that the hybrid approach results in comparable to or even better than current best known solutions, specifically in computational time.