Durán, G., Guajardo, M. and Sauré, D. (2017) Scheduling the South American Qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup by Integer Programming. European Journal of Operational Research, 262, 1109-1115.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2017.04.043

has been cited by the following article:

• TITLE: An Integer Programming Approach for Scheduling a Professional Sports League

  AUTHORS: Vardges Melkonian

  KEYWORDS: Sport Scheduling, Optimization Modeling, Integer Linear Programming

  JOURNAL NAME: American Journal of Computational Mathematics, Vol.14 No.4, December 27, 2024

  ABSTRACT: This paper gives integer linear programming (ILP) models for scheduling the League Phase of one of the most popular professional club competitions in the world, UEFA Champion’s League. There are 36 teams in the competition, but each team plays only 8 other teams in the League Phase. Thus, the difficulty or ease of a team’s opponents, known as strength of schedule (SOS), compared to other teams will be different. Our main ILP model aims to minimize the maximum difference between SOS of any two teams, thus making the schedule as fair as possible. We also give a model for creating a timetable of all the matchups obtained by the first model. The models were implemented and tested using optimization software AMPL. Our main model obtained a schedule with a difference 0.4 between the highest and the lowest SOS, while that difference is 19 for the actual 2024-2025 competition. Thus, our model returns a schedule that is significantly fairer compared to the actual competition.