Date of Award

2009

Degree Type

Dissertation

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Keys, L. Ken

Subject Headings

National Basketball Association, Sports tournaments, Sports administration, Time relaxed, Sports Scheduling, Round Robin Tournament, NBA, Basketball

Abstract

This dissertation study was inspired by the National Basketball Association regular reason scheduling problem. NBA uses the time-relaxed round robin tournament format, which has drawn less research attention compared to the other scheduling formats. Besides NBA, the National Hockey League and many amateur leagues use the time-relaxed round robin tournament as well. This dissertation study is the first ever to examine the properties of general time-relaxed round robin tournaments. Single round, double round and multiple round time-relaxed round robin tournaments are defined. The integer programming and constraint programming models for those tournaments scheduling are developed and presented. Because of the complexity of this problem, several decomposition methods are presented as well. Traveling distance is an important factor in the tournament scheduling. Traveling tournament problem defined in the time constrained conditions has been well studied. This dissertation defines the novel problem of time-relaxed traveling tournament problem. Three algorithms has been developed and compared to address this problem. In addition, this dissertation study presents all major constraints for the NBA regular season scheduling. These constraints are grouped into three categories: structural, external and fairness. Both integer programming and constraint programming are used to model these constraints and the computation studies are presented

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