A combined evolutionary metaheuristic techniques and integer programming approach to the traveling tournament problem

Abstract

This study focuses on the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP), an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem in sports scheduling. TTP holds significant importance within the sports community as suboptimal optimization can lead to financial losses in league management budgets. TTP aims to create a double round-robin tournament schedule while minimizing the total distance traveled by the teams and adhering to specific constraints unique to TTP. To solve the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP), we have proposed a new method that combines the benefits of biogeographic-based optimization (BBO) and branch and bound techniques. This hybrid approach allows for a balanced exploration and exploitation of the search space. The exact (branch and bound )method technique performs the exploitation steps, while the BBO technique performs the exploration steps. This combination, applied for the first time in TTP, aims to balance thorough exploration and efficient exploitation. The proposed method is evaluated on publicly available standard benchmarks and compared to other state-of-the-art approaches. The computational experiments demonstrate that our method achieves promising and interesting results, which can be compared favorably to previous techniques.