Publication

Minimizing breaks in incomplete round-robin tournaments

Dominique de Werra
2025

Abstract

In round-robin schedules, a break occurs when a team plays two consecutive home or two consecutive away games. Minimizing breaks is important for ensuring competitive fairness and logistical efficiency. This article addresses the problem of minimizing breaks in incomplete round-robin schedules in which each pair of teams plays again each other at most once. The problem of minimizing breaks is a classical problem that was previously thoroughly studied in the context of complete round-robin schedules. Using a graph-theoretic model we analyze structural properties of incomplete round-robin schedules. We derive some bounds on the minimum number of breaks. Then, we propose an algorithm that is able to construct incomplete single round-robin schedules minimizing the number of breaks for given numbers of teams and rounds if the number of rounds is not larger than 3/4 of the number of teams.

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/f8ec4bb4-0a63-40ed-bbec-5953cb1de35a

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Dominique de Werra
2025

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/f8ec4bb4-0a63-40ed-bbec-5953cb1de35a

About this result

Related concepts (19)

Round-robin scheduling

Round-robin (RR) is one of the algorithms employed by process and network schedulers in computing. As the term is generally used, time slices (also known as time quanta) are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all processes without priority (also known as cyclic executive). Round-robin scheduling is simple, easy to implement, and starvation-free. Round-robin scheduling can be applied to other scheduling problems, such as data packet scheduling in computer networks.

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In classical mechanics, the Kepler problem is a special case of the two-body problem, in which the two bodies interact by a central force F that varies in strength as the inverse square of the distance r between them. The force may be either attractive or repulsive. The problem is to find the position or speed of the two bodies over time given their masses, positions, and velocities. Using classical mechanics, the solution can be expressed as a Kepler orbit using six orbital elements.

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