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Scheduling English Football Fixtures over the Holiday Period Using Hyper-heuristics

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Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN XI (PPSN 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6238))

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Abstract

One of the annual issues that has to be addressed in English football is producing a fixture schedule for the holiday periods that reduces the travel distance for the fans and players. This problem can be seen as a minimisation problem which must abide to the constraints set by the Football Association. In this study, the performance of selection hyper-heuristics is investigated as a solution methodology. Hyper-heuristics aim to automate the process of selecting and combining simpler heuristics to solve computational search problems. A selection hyper-heuristic stores a single candidate solution in memory and iteratively applies selected low level heuristics to improve it. The results show that the learning hyper-heuristics outperform some previously proposed approaches and solutions published by the Football Association.

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Gibbs, J., Kendall, G., Özcan, E. (2010). Scheduling English Football Fixtures over the Holiday Period Using Hyper-heuristics. In: Schaefer, R., Cotta, C., Kołodziej, J., Rudolph, G. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN XI. PPSN 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6238. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15844-5_50

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15844-5_50

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15843-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15844-5

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