A hybrid local search approach in solving the Mirrored Traveling Tournament Problem

Scheduling for modern professional sports leagues has drawn considerable attention in recent years in that their practical applications involve significant revenues and generate challenging combinatorial optimization problems. The Traveling Tournament Problem is a sports scheduling problem that abstracts the important issues in creating time tables: feasibility and team travel, where the objective is to minimize the total distance traveled by the teams. In this paper, we tackle the mirrored version of this problem. First, an effective and comprehensive constructive algorithm is applied which quickly obtains initial solution at a very high quality. Then a hybrid local search approach was proposed based on the combination of Tabu Search and Variable Neighborhood Descent meta-heuristic, together with Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure, which explores large neighborhood with various and effective moves. Very competitive solutions are obtained for benchmark instances within a reasonable amount of time compared with previous results in the literature.