Determining matchdays in sports league schedules to minimize rest differences (Q2183190)

The problem of determining the matchdays for a fixed sports tournament schedule is considered. The objective is to find a fair schedule where opposing teams in matches do not have rest durations of different lengths after their games in the previous round. An integer linear programming formulation is provided to minimize the total rest difference among opposing teams. Furthermore, it is shown that the problem can be solved in polynomial time for the often used canonical schedules. Finally, computational results are presented for data from different European soccer leagues.