Solving the Travelling Tournament Problem: A Combined Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Approach

The Travelling Tournament Problem is a sports timetabling problem requiring production of a minimum distance double round-robin tournament for a group of n teams. Even small instances of this problem seem to be very difficult to solve. In this paper, we present the first provably optimal solution for an instance of eight teams. The solution methodology is a parallel implementation of a branch-and-price algorithm that uses integer programming to solve the master problem and constraint programming to solve the pricing problem. Additionally, constraint programming is used as a primal heuristic.