Lake Highlands Soccer Association Game Scheduling
Client: Lake Highlands Soccer Association
Team: Sherif Khalifa
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2008
Documents: Final Report (Word), Presentation (PPT)
The scheduling of sports competitions is a challenge for both professional teams, such as the NBA, to amateur leagues. In this project an effective strategy to model sports scheduling is developed.
Lake Highlands Soccer Association was formed in 1972 to promote the sport of Soccer in Dallas’ Lake Highlands area and throughout North Texas and serves as the “Home Association” for about 1,800 youth players from neighborhoods in the Dallas and Richardson school districts. The LHSA’s Boys League Director provided data that is needed in developing their schedules and a constraint-programming model was implemented that meets all their requirements and delivers a far more effective solution.
Similar to many leagues, Lake Highland Soccer Association uses an inefficient method of scheduling to determine all leagues games. There is no model in place, and schedules are done manually, leading to many wasted hours to determine a schedule that may be suitable to the each league’s constraints.In working on a solution I was advised to focus on Constraint Programming and use ILOG’s Optimization Programming Language to model the program and assist in finding a solution. After taking all the different requirements of the Leagues from the director, I developed a computer solution that will solve the scheduling problem and provide a feasible schedule. Separate programs are used for each formation of the leagues. The model displays solutions to the constraints at hand, and forms a simple easy user-friendly schedule in a matter of seconds.