Subj: Scheduling/Travel
Questions
Date: 5/17/01
7:53:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: JasonJ1052
To: mmeyers@centralhockeyleague.com
Michael:
I got your email address from Amy Pickett.
Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Jason Jennette, and I am a
hockey fan in Macon, GA. I'm also a very active member of the CHL mailing list
on the internet.
I am a graduate student in Computer Science here in Macon and have begun
working on my masters thesis. Without getting too detailed, my thesis revolves
around scheduling and optimization for sports league. Because I am most
familiar with the CHL, I have used the CHL for the majority of my test data.
You can see some of the preliminary work at:
http://www.cs.mercer.edu/courses/jason%20jennette/thesis/index.htm
I do have a few questions that tend to be of a more technical nature that I
hope you can help me with. With the BC and Topeka troubles this season, I have
held off of emailing earlier, as I figure you were rather busy. I know the next
season is coming soon in the scheduling process, so I hope to get my foot in
the door before the process gets too far along.
Without digging in too deep, my thesis revolves around the scheduling of the league
schedule with an eye towards minimizing travel distances for the entire season.
With the idea that more travel increases costs, hopefully an
"optimized" schedule would save money.
1) Is there a maximum distance a team would be scheduled to travel overnight
for a game? I currently have records from the 1996-97 season where Macon had to
travel almost 1000 miles overnight for a game, but most overnight travel for
that season was closer to the 400 mile range.
2) I know there is a restriction against any team playing 4 games in 4 nights.
I also have noted that no team has ever played 3 home games in 3 nights. I dont
know if the second is a league restriction or not. I suspect it would be a bad
idea to try 3 consecutive home games, but I wasnt sure if there were any
restrictions on it. I was wondering if there were any other restrictions along
these lines? I know there is no restrictions on how many times 2 teams can play
each other in a row, as Macon and Columbus played 4 or 5 games in a row over a
span of 2 weeks 2 years ago.
3) When it is time to start creating the schedule, I know that most leagues ask
the teams to submit "available dates" when their arena is open. I was
wondering if this list may include the teams preferences. For example, Macon
always wants a new years eve game, even if it isnt a weekend date. Could they
request that specific home date at the expense of possibly a weekend date? If
preferences aren't taken into account, is this something that could be useful?
Currently, my algorithm "drafts" home dates.. going through each
team's list of preferred home dates and assigning them 1 game for each team,
until the schedule is done. This section of the algorithm may change in the
near future, but while I have the questions I figured I might as well ask.
4) Do teams get to ask for specific opponents for games? Macon has not been in
the league long enough to have any traditional opponents yet, but I have heard
that some of the western teams see the same team on special dates each year. I
dont know if this is true or just a fluke of the schedule.
5) Is there any easily identifiable way to say how you decide when a team will
take its swing to the opposite division? In Macon's first season, all of the
eastern teams went west in the first half of the season, and the western
division teams came east in the last half of the season. With the increase in
inter-divisional games, and the unbalanced schedule between divisions, there
isn't really much of a "western swing" anymore, but I know it is
preferable to pick up 2 or 3 games in the other division while you are on that
side of the league.
6) Lastly.. and this questions just came up in the past 4 or 5 days. I have
assumed that most road teams would prefer 2 game stands in a city to cut down
on travel costs. A friend from Wichita told me that their attendance actually
suffers from Fri/Sat series where two weekends with 1 home game each are better
overall than 1 weekend with 2 games and 1 weekend off. I will continue to
evaluate past attendance figures on this topic and see if I can find anything.
If you already have information on this, that could save me a lot of work.
(You can actually see some of my preliminary work on this topic at the link
above.)
For right now those are the major questions I am facing. very quickly, I will
give the sequence that my current algorithm uses for creating a schedule. If
you see anything that needs changing or would like to give me a quick review of
how the CHl schedule gets created, that would be wonderful:
* Get the list of preferred home dates from each team, in their order of
preference.
* "Draft" the home games. Using the lists from the previous step,
nail down all of the home dates for the entire season.
* Begin assigning the road teams for each of the games, trying to keep their
travel distances to a minimum.
Any assignments that will not work need to get kicked out as an error. How to
deal with these errors is still up for debate. My advisor wants me to look into
picking the home and road teams at the same time, instead of 1 pass for the
home dates and then 1 pass for the road teams. This would cut down on
impossible matchups (due to distance) but would drastically increase the work
needed to handle other issues, in particular it may back a team into a corner
for the last game of the season, forcing them to criss cross the country 4 or 5
times in 2 weeks.
I know this is a lot to digest. I have tried to make everything as clear as
possible so that I won't need to have any follow up questions. If there are any
unclear parts of my questions, please feel free to let me know.
my private email is JasonJ1052@aol.com
my work email is Jennette_JL@mercer.edu
home phone is 478-741-6408
work phone is 478-301-288
After my program is up and running, and if you think it could be useful,
perhaps I could attempt to apply my program to the CHL schedule for next year.
With the possible WPHL merger, and all of the uncertainties for the future
(interleague play, mergers, new teams, etc) I think it may be a bit much to try
and wedge in, but hopefully my program will be flexible enough to handle
anything you can throw at it.
That is the hope.. we'll see how it goes.
I thank you for your time,
Jason Jennette