Korean Professional Baseball League Scheduling

최적화 기법을 활용한 프로야구 일정 계획

In this paper, we discuss the schedule problems for Korean Professional Baseball League (KPBL) and propose approaches to solve these problems by applying Integer Programming. A schedule in a sport league must satisfy lots of constraints on timing such as organizational, attractiveness, and fairness requirements. Organizational requirements cover a set of rules which have to guarantee that all the games can be scheduled according to the regulations imposed by Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). Attractiveness requirements focus on what stadium visitors, television spectators, and the clubs expect, that is, a varied, eventful, and exciting season. Fairness requirements have to guarantee that no team is handicapped or favored in comparison with the others. In addition to finding a feasible schedule that meets all the constraints, the problem addressed in this paper has the additional complexity of having the objective of minimizing the travel costs and every team has the balancing number of the games in home. We formalize the KPBL problem into an optimization problem and adopt the concept of evolution strategy to solve it. Using the method proposed, it is efficient to find better results than approaches developed before.