Abstract
We consider the traveling tournament problem, which is a well-known benchmark problem in tournament timetabling. The most important variant of the problem imposes restrictions on the number of consecutive home games or away games a team may have. We consider the case where at most two consecutive home games or away games are allowed. We show that the well-known independent lower bound for this case cannot be reached and present an approximation algorithm that has an approximation ratio of \(3/2+\frac{6}{n-4}\), where n is the number of teams in the tournament. In the case that n is divisible by 4, this approximation ratio improves to \(3/2+\frac{5}{n-1}\).
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Thielen, C., Westphal, S. (2010). Approximating the Traveling Tournament Problem with Maximum Tour Length 2. In: Cheong, O., Chwa, KY., Park, K. (eds) Algorithms and Computation. ISAAC 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6507. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17514-5_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17514-5_26
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