Scheduling social tournaments locally

Abstract

Tournament scheduling, such as the social golfer problem, has attracted significant attention in recent years because of their highly symmetrical and combinatorial nature. This paper presents an effective local search algorithm for a variety of tournament scheduling problems, including social golfer problems, debating tournaments, judge assignments and very social golfers. The algorithm finds high-quality solutions on all problems, including new solutions to open problems. Interestingly, the algorithm does not incorporate any symmetry-breaking schemes and is conceptually simple when compared to advanced constraint-programming solutions.