Many sports tournaments partition teams into multiple leagues (also called divisions) such that teams only play games with teams from their own league.
The partitioning of the teams might be based on geographical location or skill set, and promotion and relegation is usually strictly defined.
The determination of a timetable for the different leagues is not trivial due to the large number of inter-league constraints.
As an example, police might enforce that two teams located in the same city cannot play simultaneously at home.
Many professional tournaments avoid inter-league conflicts by employing a sequential timetabling generation scheme: first the timetable of the highest ranked league is scheduled after which the resulting dependencies are propagated to all lower-ranked leagues.
However, in most non-professional leagues, this sequential scheme is not very practical since it does not fully exploit scarce resources and no single league should be given priority over the other leagues.
Our website offers several types of multileague timetabling problem instances that do not admit a sequential timetabling generation scheme.
Below is a list with a brief description for each of the categories.
- Scheduling English football fixtures over holiday periods
- Every year the English football authorities produce a set of fixtures for the four main divisions in England. Over the Christmas and New Year period every team has to play two fixtures; one being played at their home venue and the other at an opponent's venue. There are various other constraints that also have to be respected with the overall objective being to minimize the total distance travelled by all teams. Under the XML-files tab, data is available for four different seasons (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005). We refer to
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