{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Traveling Tournament Problem with Maximum Tour Length Two: A Practical Algorithm with An Improved Approximation Bound","authors":[{"name":"Jingyang Zhao","slug":"jingyang-zhao","given":"Jingyang","family":"Zhao","affiliation":""},{"name":"Mingyu Xiao","slug":"mingyu-xiao","given":"Mingyu","family":"Xiao","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"The Traveling Tournament Problem is a well-known benchmark problem in tournament timetabling, which asks us to design a schedule of home/away games of n teams (n is even) under some feasibility requirements such that the total traveling distance of all the n teams is minimized. In this paper, we study TTP-2, the traveling tournament problem where at most two consecutive home games or away games are allowed, and give an effective algorithm for n/2 being odd. Experiments on the well-known benchmark sets show that we can beat previously known solutions for all instances with n/2 being odd by an average improvement of 2.66%. Furthermore, we improve the theoretical approximation ratio from 3/2+O(1/n) to 1+O(1/n) for n/2 being odd, answering a challenging open problem in this area.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2021/578","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/578","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0578.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/578.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/bibtex/578","volume":{"slug":"2021","title":"Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2021","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/","year":2021,"location":"Montreal","dates":"19-27 August 2021","editors":"Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou","isbn":"978-0-9992411-9-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2021"},"section":"Planning and Scheduling","track":"Main Track","number":578,"pages":{"first":4206,"last":4212},"keywords":["Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms","Planning and Scheduling: Theoretical Foundations of Planning","Planning and Scheduling: Scheduling"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}