Practical Algorithms with Guaranteed Approximation Ratio for TTP with Maximum Tour Length Two

Abstract: The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a hard but interesting sports scheduling problem inspired by Major League Baseball, which is to design a double round-robin schedule such that each pair of teams plays one game in each other's home venue, minimizing the total distance traveled by all $n$ teams ($n$ is even). In this paper, we consider TTP-2, i.e., TTP under the constraint that at most two consecutive home games or away games are allowed for each team. We propose practical algorithms for TTP-2 with improved approximation ratios. Due to the different structural properties of the problem, all known algorithms for TTP-2 are different for $n/2$ being odd and even, and our algorithms are also different for these two cases. For even $n/2$, our approximation ratio is $1+3/n$, improving the previous result of $1+4/n$. For odd $n/2$, our approximation ratio is $1+5/n$, improving the previous result of $3/2+6/n$. In practice, our algorithms are easy to implement. Experiments on well-known benchmark sets show that our algorithms beat previously known solutions for all instances with an average improvement of $5.66\%$.