An RCPSP-based model for scheduling a table tennis league

Sigrid Knust
Universitaet Osnabrueck
Institut fuer Informatik

We consider a scheduling problem which occurs in planning a (hobby) table 
tennis league of the TTVN (German table tennis federation of lower saxony).
Such a league consists of n different teams (usually n=8,10,12) which play
a double round robin tournament during a season, which is partitioned into
two half series.
Each team plays against each other team twice (one game at home, the other 
away), the number of home and away games per half series should be balanced
for each team.
Before a half series is planned, each team specifies certain days where home 
games can be played and certain days where no away games should be scheduled.
Additionally, due to large traveling times certain games may only be scheduled 
at weekends. The objective is to find a schedule in which the games are
spread evely over the whole season.

The described scheduling problem may be modeled as a special case of the
multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP)
with time-dependent resource profiles and partially renewable resources.
In the talk we will present more details of the model (especially on the
different resources). While all hard constraints can be modeled with the
concepts of nonrenewable, renewable and partially renewable resources,
violations of the soft constraints are penalized in the objective function.