Baseball Scheduling

Scheduling complex sports events, with many restrictions and preferences, is a known difficult problem to automate.  New work at Johns Hopkins addresses the problem.  " ... A team of Johns Hopkins University researchers has developed a system that uses thousands of lines of computer code to satisfy all of a league's scheduling rules, and as many of the teams' requests and preferences as possible.

 .... The system, developed by associate research scientist Anton Dahbura and professor Donniell Fishkind, allows 10,000 schedule limitations and even more factors to be fed into a supercomputer, which produces a workable schedule. The methodology employs combinatorial optimization, which is the concept that there should be at least one schedule that optimally satisfies every rule and team request, via a combination of integers. .... "