Abstract

In most sport leagues, a schedule is announced before the start of the season. However, due to unexpected events (e.g. bad weather conditions), some games cannot be played on the announced date. To handle this, before the start of the season, empty so-called catch-up rounds are positioned in the schedule as a buffer. During the season, games can then be rescheduled to these catch-up rounds. We develop a two-stage stochastic programming approach to determine where to position the catch-up rounds in order to maintain the quality of the realized schedule. While our method is generally applicable, we demonstrate its use with soccer. Scenarios and their probabilities are deduced from historical data from 10 major European soccer leagues. We study the impact of the number of catch-up rounds and costs on the positions of catch-up rounds and compare our method with other proactive strategies from the literature. We conclude with a case study based on the English Premier League. In particular when many games cannot be played as planned and few catch-up rounds are available, our stochastic programming approach outperforms existing methods with respect to maintaining a fair ranking and avoiding cancelled games.

中文翻译：

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一种在循环体育联赛中安排追赶回合的随机编程方法

摘要

在大多数体育联盟中，赛程表会在赛季开始前公布。但是，由于突发事件（例如恶劣的天气条件），某些游戏无法在公布的日期进行。为了解决这个问题，在赛季开始之前，空的所谓的追赶回合被放置在日程表中作为缓冲。在赛季期间，比赛可以重新安排到这些追赶回合。我们开发了一种两阶段随机编程方法来确定在哪里放置追赶回合，以保持已实现时间表的质量。虽然我们的方法普遍适用，但我们展示了它在足球中的使用。情景及其概率是从 10 个欧洲主要足球联赛的历史数据中推导出来的。我们研究了追赶回合数和成本对追赶回合位置的影响，并将我们的方法与文献中的其他主动策略进行了比较。我们以基于英超联赛的案例研究结束。特别是当许多游戏无法按计划进行并且很少有追赶回合可用时，我们的随机编程方法在保持公平排名和避免取消游戏方面优于现有方法。