SFA Referee Allocation Scheme

TL;DR

This paper presents a new greedy algorithm for automating referee allocation in Scottish football, reducing manual effort and time for secretaries through a web-based system.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel greedy algorithm for referee allocation and develops a practical web-based system, improving efficiency over manual methods.

Findings

Prototype system successfully tested with SFA secretaries.

Final system adopted for future use by SFA.

Reduction in time and effort for referee allocation.

Abstract

For many sports, the allocation of officials to matches is performed manually and is a very time consuming procedure. For the Scottish Football Association (SFA), the allocation of referees and other officials to matches is governed by a number of rules specifying the expertise required from the different types of official at each level, e.g. Scottish Premiership League referee must be a grade 1 with high experience. The allocation requires an SFA secretary to expend several hours to find suitable officials, contact them and assign them. Most of the time, the secretary is a volunteer who performs the allocation as a hobby and it would be useful to reduce his costs and time. The project aims to reduce the burden on SFA, and potentially other secretaries, by developing a program to assign SFA officials. A suitable algorithm must be devised to search through the set of data about matches and officials and find a potential allocation. The program then updates the database with the new data, and provides a web interface for both secretaries and officials. A prototype system using the new greedy algorithm has been implemented and evaluated with SFA secretaries. A final usable referee allocation system has been designed that uses the greedy algorithm, and is extended after evaluation of the prototype. The final allocation system based provides both a command line and a web interface and has also been evaluated by SFA secretaries. In their letters of recommendation in Appendix F the SFA secretaries indicate that the final allocation system it will be used again in the future.