The solution
Until the 2015–16 season, the Italian Volleyball League built fixture lists with software that generated home-and-away sequences, then adjusted dates manually for gym availability, European schedules, and organizational limits.
In 2015, Lega Pallavolo's Fabrizio Rossini approached the Operations Research group at the University of Florence (Global Optimization Laboratory, with Fabio Schoen, Marco Sciandrone, Veronica Piccialli, Guido Cocchi, Alessandro Galligari, and Federica Nicolino). They modeled the full season as a mixed-integer program.
The league adopted the mathematical model's solution as the official Serie A calendar for 2016/17 and subsequent seasons; the work was published in Interfaces in 2018.
What it achieved
Schedule the whole league as one optimization.
Why it worked
A model can balance dozens of constraints—fairness, venues, TV—that manual fixes juggled poorly.
Solving to optimality gives the league a defensible, repeatable calendar each season.
The league's own involvement ensured the constraints were the real ones.
What can be applied
A sports calendar that must balance fairness and TV revenue is an optimization problem; if the league helps specify the constraints, the model's output can simply become the schedule.
Aftermath
The calendar remained in use in following seasons, and the approach was published and presented as a model for sports scheduling practice.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE
The sources
- Scheduling the Italian National Volleyball Tournament econpapers.repec.org
- Calendars project legavolley.it
- Scheduling the Italian National Volleyball Tournament pubsonline.informs.org