Scheduling the Australian Football League

Abstract

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, such as higher attendance and TV viewership, lower costs and increased fairness. The Australian Football League is particularly interesting because of an unusual competition format integrating a single round-robin tournament with additional games. Furthermore, several teams have multiple home venues and some venues are shared by multiple teams. This paper presents a 3-phase process to schedule the Australian Football League. The resulting solution outperforms the official schedule with respect to minimizing and balancing travel distance and breaks, while satisfying more requirements.

Keywords:

• sports
• timetabling
• multiple venues
• travel distance
• heuristics

Notes

1 “Supercomputers tackle toughest mathemathics problem in world sport—the AFL draw”. See http://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/supercomputers-tackle-toughest-mathemathics-problem-in-world-sport-the-afl-draw/story-fnelctok-1226500295493 (Published 22.10.2012)

2 See http://www.inf.uos.de/knust/sportssched/sportlit_class

3 The official 2013 schedule can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_AFL_season; our schedule is available upon request from the authors.