Scheduling of the Uruguayan Football and Basketball Leagues

Abstract

Football in Uruguay is the most popular sport, representing an important part of the country’s culture. It is not surprising that the Uruguayan football championship serves as entertainment for a large part of the population. The process of designing a concrete fixture has many implications, for instance: is the tournament sportingly fair? is it attractive for the fans? is it economically profitable? In this work, we tackle the scheduling of fixtures for both Uruguayan football and basketball leagues to improve the fairness of the competitions. We address this problem following a multi-objective approach and use the well-known NSGA-II, as well as an Integer Programming solver for considering each objective independently. The results obtained show the effectiveness of both algorithms studied to find high-quality solutions. The resulting fixtures are far superior to the ones that are actually being used in the leagues.