A Parallel Simulated Annealing Approach for the Mirrored Traveling Tournament Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parallel simulated annealing method using OpenMP to efficiently solve the Mirrored Traveling Tournament Problem, significantly increasing solution exploration speed on shared memory systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel parallel approach for mTTP, demonstrating improved solution exploration speed and efficiency over traditional methods.

Findings

Speed up of 1.5x to 2.2x in solutions explored per second.

Parallel approach outperforms sequential methods in solution probing.

Effective utilization of shared memory systems for sports scheduling problems.

Abstract

The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a benchmark problem in sports scheduling and has been extensively studied in recent years. The Mirrored Traveling Tournament Problem (mTTP) is variation of the TTP that represents certain types of sports scheduling problems where the main objective is to minimize the total distance traveled by all the participating teams. In this paper we test a parallel simulated annealing approach for solving the mTTP using OpenMP on shared memory systems and we found that this approach is superior especially with respect to the number of solution instances that are probed per second. We also see that there is significant speed up of 1.5x - 2.2x in terms of number of solutions explored per unit time.