Scheduling the Main Professional Soccer League of Argentina

2020 Daniel H. Wagner Finalist We develop an integer programming approach to schedule the main professional soccer league of Argentina. Among many other criteria, our approach aims at ensuring sporting fairness, both in terms of distances travelled by all teams, and alternating the home-away status of each match in consecutive tournaments. An important methodological aspect of our approach is the introduction of geographical clusters and cluster patterns, which help us finding high-quality schedules in short time. Our work has been implemented in practice to schedule the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons of the league.