Sailing League Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces combinatorial design problems related to sailing leagues, formulates them as optimization problems, and applies heuristics to improve tournament scheduling based on real-world case studies.

Contribution

It provides new optimization formulations and heuristics specifically tailored for sailing league scheduling, connecting combinatorial designs with practical tournament planning.

Findings

Optimization formulations enable better scheduling solutions

Heuristics improve tournament fairness and efficiency

Case studies demonstrate practical applicability

Abstract

We describe a class of combinatorial design problems which typically occur in professional sailing league competitions. We discuss connections to resolvable block designs and equitable coverings and to scheduling problems in operations research. We in particular give suitable boolean quadratic and integer linear optimization problem formulations, as well as further heuristics and restrictions, that can be used to solve sailing league problems in practice. We apply those techniques to three case studies obtained from real sailing leagues and compare the results with previously used tournament plans.