Research Information System
12th Annual International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, 7 - 10 March 2022, pp.4745-4756, (Full Text)
Sports scheduling has become an important and difficult research problem in recent years. Deciding which teams will
play on which pitch and at what time is a challenge to sports administrators because it requires the achievement of
fairness accounting for various factors that affect stakeholders. This paper proposes an integer programming model
for the problem of determining the optimal matchday schedule for an entire season of Turkish Super League under
two fairness criteria. The objective is to ensure that team-specific matchday distributions are as uniform as possible.
We model the problem as a nonlinear binary integer program. Deviations from ideal matchday assignments obtained
through the optimal schedule are compared with those of manual schedules constructed by the Turkish Football
Federation. The results indicate that seasonal fixture can be significantly improved by implementing the optimal
schedule.