Scheduling the Italian National Volleyball Tournament

In this paper, we present our approach to sports scheduling, a process that eventually led the Italian Volleyball League to adopt our calendar for the 2016-2017 and the subsequent seasons. Sports scheduling is a hard combinatorial optimization problem whose solution requires modeling many different aspects of sports, some of which are distinctive to each sport or nation. Being capable of producing a high-quality schedule is important both for balancing undesirable matches among teams and for ensuring adequate coverage by television and other media. Through strong interaction with the Italian Volleyball League, we modeled and solved the problem to optimality using standard mathematical programming solvers. We also tested our solution using previous seasons’ tournaments to prove the capability of our model.