The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2011–2014
Integer programming gave Germany's basketball league its first non-mirrored schedule
A University of Göttingen optimizer matched arena availability, TV slots and team wishes, ending the BBL's reliance on mirrored schedules.
German Basketball League (Beko BBL)
the move
The German Basketball League (Beko BBL) schedules 18 first-division teams whose games mostly take place in multipurpose arenas shared with other events.
Classic mirrored schedules, which repeat the first half's pairings in the second half, could not respect arena availability, so games were postponed, tickets went unsold and standings became unbalanced.
University of Göttingen researcher Stephan Westphal built optimization models that handle arena availability, minimize successive home or away games, assign marquee games to TV slots, build a derby day and meet team requests.
He proved to the BBL that mirrored schedules cannot satisfy its requirements; the league used his software to generate its 2011–2012 season and adopted non-mirrored schedules for the first time.
why it works
- Optimization respected arena bookings that classic schedules ignored.
- Proving the old format impossible made change easy to justify.
- TV slots and derby days turned the schedule into a revenue tool.
- The approach generalized to other leagues with the same constraints.
what transfers
A league's standard scheduling pattern can be the problem: prove the incumbent format mathematically incapable, and the improved one gets adopted.
what came after
The scheduling software was applied to the BBL's 2011–2012 season, and the work won the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, awarded at the INFORMS Annual Meeting; the paper appeared in Interfaces (2014).
references
- Scheduling the German Basketball League
- Scheduling the German Basketball League (Wagner Prize presentation)
- 2013 Wagner Competition Videos
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