{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"A Better Approximation for Bipartite Traveling Tournament in Inter-League Sports Scheduling","authors":[{"name":"Jingyang Zhao","slug":"jingyang-zhao","given":"Jingyang","family":"Zhao","affiliation":"University of Electronic Science and Technology of China , Chengdu , China"},{"name":"Mingyu Xiao","slug":"mingyu-xiao","given":"Mingyu","family":"Xiao","affiliation":"University of Electronic Science and Technology of China , Chengdu , China"}],"abstract":"The bipartite traveling tournament problem (BTTP) was initially introduced by Hoshino and Kawarabayashi (AAAI 2011) to address inter-league sports scheduling, which aims to design a feasible bipartite tournament between two n-team leagues under some constraints such that the total traveling distance of all participating teams is minimized. Since its introduction, several heuristic methods have been developed to design feasible schedules for NBA, NPB and so on. In terms of solution quality with a theoretical guarantee, previously only a (2+ε) approximation is known for the case that n≡0 (mod 3). Whether there are similar results for the cases that n≡1 (mod 3) and n≡2 (mod 3) was asked in the literature. In this paper, we answer this question positively by proposing a (3/2+ε)-approximation algorithm for any n and any constant ε>0, which also improves the previous ratio for the case that n≡0 (mod 3).","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2024/753","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/753","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/0753.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/753.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/bibtex/753","volume":{"slug":"2024","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2024","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/","year":2024,"location":"Jeju, Korea","dates":"3-9 August 2024","editors":"Kate Larson","isbn":"978-1-956792-04-1","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2024"},"section":"Planning and Scheduling","track":"Main Track","number":753,"pages":{"first":6814,"last":6822},"keywords":["Planning and Scheduling: PS: Scheduling","Planning and Scheduling: PS: Theoretical foundations of planning","Planning and Scheduling: PS: Routing"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Anagnostopoulos et al., 2006] Aris Anagnostopoulos, Lau- rent Michel, Pascal Van Hentenryck, and Yannis Verga- dos. 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