• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Scheduling Softball Series in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference
  • Contributor: Saur, Marjorie Cone; Starr, Kaleigh; Husted, Mark; Newman, Alexandra M.
  • imprint: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2012
  • Published in: Interfaces
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1287/inte.1110.0576
  • ISSN: 0092-2102; 1526-551X
  • Keywords: Management of Technology and Innovation ; Management Science and Operations Research ; Strategy and Management
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: <jats:p> The Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference is a Division II National Collegiate Athletic Association conference that offers, inter alia, women's softball. Within the conference, four-game series are played against every other conference team according to a temporally constrained schedule. Manually generated schedules result in imbalances, such as breaks of multiple home or away series and away-series season openers and closers for the same team, and fail to mitigate weather-related series disruptions. Our integer-programming–based schedules eliminate these problems while ensuring that all requisite series are played. In this paper, we present a 40-game schedule; we do not present 36- and 44-game schedules, which are nearly equivalent. For its 2011 softball season, the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference adopted the 40-game schedule from these three schedules. </jats:p>