Dear scheduling researcher,

We are delighted to announce the talk given by Dries Goossens (Ghent University). The title is "Sports scheduling: from consulting to science".

The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, May 10 at 13:00 UTC. Join Zoom Meeting https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/96538835333?pwd=bktZNDliS09sNllZeXh0aWFBdFpidz09 Meeting ID: 965 3883 5333 Passcode: 652168

You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A

The abstract follows. Any sports competition needs a schedule, specifying when and where teams meet each other. Apart from a number of pioneering theoretical results, most sports timetabling contributions in the literature read as case studies, describing a single problem instance for which a tailored algorithm is developed and compared to a manual solution. While the reported problems are challenging, and the algorithms made an impact in practice, it is hard to assess algorithmic performance. Indeed, real-life problem instances are rarely shared, and few realistic benchmark instances are available. In this talk, we discuss our efforts to obtain insights in the strengths and weaknesses of several state-of-the-art sport scheduling algorithms, and to predict which algorithm to select for which type of problem. The story covers the development of a problem classification and unifying data format, the generation of a set of diverse and realistic benchmark instance, the organization of a timetabling competition, and an instance space analysis for sports scheduling.

The next talk in our series will be: Erwin Pesch (Uni of Siegen) | May 24 | Conflict-Free Crane Scheduling in a Seaport Terminal. For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/

With kind regards

Zdenek, Mike and Guohua