ILOG has a press release on using constraint programming for the Japanese Football (soccer for Americans) League. Seems like a pretty big league:
J. LEAGUE is a top professional football (soccer) league in
Japan and one of the most successful leagues in the Asian Football Confederation. The organization recognized a need to automate and streamline its complex match scheduling process, involving 33 teams and 79 schedules, with a total of 682 matches over a 10-month playing season. With no packaged application available for complex scheduling, J. LEAGUE decided on a custom approach based on optimization technology from ILOG. Optimization improves business decision making speed and efficiency by allowing organizations to calculate the best utilization of existing resources — in this case, team personnel, stadiums and spectators.
It is not clear why 33 teams need 79 schedules! I find it hard enough to find a schedule for every team in a league.
79 schedules for 33 teams is pretty crazy. I’m sure they think there’s a good reason for it though 🙂
Well, each of the 18 teams in J1 play 34 matches per season and each of the 15 teams in J2 play 42 per season. The 16th team of J1 plays two games with the third team in J2 (the winner plays in J1 in the next season). I suspect that the 79th schedule is the Super Cup.