Abstract

Major college conferences, such as BigTen, basketball matches draw millions of viewers each year. Besides team members care about the fairness of a schedule, there are also loyal fans and die-hard team followers who are upset with inconvenient shceduling, not to mention leaders of other sports, such as swimming and wresting, who have to schedule around basketball games. For a schedule to be fair, we may require that every team plays the same number of weekday games and weekend games, both on road and at home. According to this criterion, four BigTen schools do not have a fair schedule in 2007. There are of course also other fairness criteria.

Because of the high complexity of such schedules, it is almost impossible to produce a schedule by hand satisfying all the fairness criteria. In this talk, we exam the computer techniques which can be used to do the job quickly and correctly. In particular, we show that the standard SAT solvers, which solve the satisfaction problem of propositional logic, are very competitive in solving such scheduling problems. We also show that how to specify the scheduleing problem properly in propositional logic is very important to the success of such SAT solvers.