The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2018–2022
Mathematical programming scheduled the Valley Baseball League in under a minute
Furman researchers built a revenue-maximizing 42-game schedule for an 11-team summer league, replacing dozens of hours of manual work.
Valley Baseball League
the move
The Valley Baseball League, a collegiate summer league in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, has 11 teams playing 42 games each season — an odd team count that makes scheduling hard.
League management also faced venue-sharing constraints, travel limits, an equitable spread of off-days, and team-specific requests for home/away games and road trips.
Furman University researchers encoded all of it in a mathematical programming model; specialized software on modest hardware outputs the single best revenue-generating schedule in under a minute.
The schedule generated by the model was enthusiastically adopted for the 2020 season and significantly outperformed previous manually produced schedules.
why it works
- One model respected every league mandate and team request at once.
- A minute of compute replaced dozens of hours of staff time.
- Revenue maximization mattered to a financially constrained amateur league.
- Adoption proved the model worked in practice, not just on paper.
what transfers
Amateur leagues with scarce money can still afford optimization: a model that respects every constraint and answers in a minute beats weeks of manual scheduling.
what came after
The league had already used analytics-assisted schedules from 2018; the mathematical-programming schedule was adopted for 2020 and outperformed manual ones. The work was presented at Furman Engaged and published in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (2022).
references
- Scheduling the Valley Baseball League
- VBL Announces 2018 Schedule
- Scheduling the Valley Baseball League (Furman Engaged)
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