Towards a characterisation of the behaviour of stochastic local search algorithms for SAT
Artificial Intelligence
Local Search Algorithms for SAT: An Empirical Evaluation
Journal of Automated Reasoning
Probability Distribution of Solution Time in GRASP: An Experimental Investigation
Journal of Heuristics
The Traveling Tournament Problem Description and Benchmarks
CP '01 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming
Scheduling a Major College Basketball Conference
Operations Research
A simulated annealing approach to the traveling tournament problem
Journal of Scheduling
Efficient parallel cooperative implementations of GRASP heuristics
Parallel Computing
Referee assignment in sports leagues
PATAT'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Practice and theory of automated timetabling VI
Evaluating las vegas algorithms: pitfalls and remedies
UAI'98 Proceedings of the Fourteenth conference on Uncertainty in artificial intelligence
The traveling tournament problem with predefined venues
Journal of Scheduling
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Optimization in sports is a field of increasing interest. A novel problem in sports management is the Referee Assignment Problem, in which a limited number of referees with different qualifications and availabilities should be assigned to a set of games already scheduled. We extend and improve a previous three-phase approach for this problem, based on a constructive heuristic, a repair heuristic to make the initial solutions feasible, and an ILS improvement heuristic. We propose a new constructive algorithm based on a greedy criterion to build initial solutions. Furthermore, we develop a hybridization strategy in which a mixed integer programming exact algorithm replaces the original neighborhood-based local search within the ILS heuristic. Computational experiments are performed for large realistic instances. The use of time-to-target-solution-value plots is emphasized in the evaluation of the numerical results, illustrating the efficiency and the robustness of the new approach. The proposed hybridization of MIP with local search can be extended to other metaheuristics and applications, opening a new research avenue to more robust algorithms.