Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues

Yavuz M., Inan U. H., FIĞLALI A.

COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH, vol.35, no.9, pp.2937-2951, 2008 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 35 Issue: 9
  • Publication Date: 2008
  • Doi Number: 10.1016/j.cor.2007.01.004
  • Journal Name: COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
  • Page Numbers: pp.2937-2951
  • Keywords: referee assignment, sports, heuristics, local search
  • Kocaeli University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

Assignment of referees to football games is an important problem faced in professional football leagues. Despite its importance, the problem has received limited academic attention. This paper presents a model and analysis of the problem for fair referee assignments, and develops a constructive heuristic and a local search procedure for its solution. Results from an extensive computational study show that the methods are effective in solving the problem in a second of computation time and yielding an excellent solution quality. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.