George L. Nemhauser - Sports Scheduling

College and professional sports, including basketball, baseball, football and hockey, is a multi-billion dollar industry with a substantial part of the revenue derived from television. To maximize revenue, it is crucial to have important games televised on the right days and times. These requirements frequently conflict with more traditional requirements of a "fair" schedule that balances strength of schedule, home and away games, and travel. Sports scheduling can be thought of as the engineering of the sports entertainment supply chain. A typical model for a sports scheduling problem is a combinatorial design with nasty side constraints and multi-objectives. In this talk we discuss our experience with the Sports Scheduling Group in scheduling ACC basketball and football, and major league baseball.