[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-1-en-105":3,"doc-seo-393331-105":53,"doc-detail-393331-en":126},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,14,19,24,29,34,39,44,49],{"id":8,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":11,"show_sort_weight":12,"slug":13},11,1,"Template","Presentations",90,"presentations",{"id":15,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":16,"show_sort_weight":17,"slug":18},12,"Resumes",80,"resumes",{"id":20,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":21,"show_sort_weight":22,"slug":23},14,"Invoices",70,"invoices",{"id":25,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":26,"show_sort_weight":27,"slug":28},15,"Posters",60,"posters",{"id":30,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":31,"show_sort_weight":32,"slug":33},16,"Social Media",50,"social-media",{"id":35,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":36,"show_sort_weight":37,"slug":38},17,"Forms",40,"forms",{"id":40,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":41,"show_sort_weight":42,"slug":43},18,"Letters",30,"letters",{"id":45,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":46,"show_sort_weight":47,"slug":48},21,"Paper Templates",5,"papers-templates",{"id":50,"doc_module":9,"doc_module_name":10,"category_name":51,"show_sort_weight":4,"slug":52},158,"General","general-158",{"code":4,"msg":54,"data":55},"ok",{"site_id":56,"language":57,"slug":58,"title":59,"keywords":60,"description":61,"schema_data":62,"social_meta":119,"head_meta":121,"extra_data":123,"updated_unix":125},105,"en","scheduling-the-australian-football-league-abstract-and-3-phase-scheduling-approach","Scheduling the Australian Football League - Abstract and 3-Phase Scheduling Approach","","Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is highly demanding, since schedule quality affects attendance, TV viewership, costs, and fairness. The Australian Football League is especially challenging due to an unusual format combining a single round robin with additional matches, plus multiple home venues and shared venues across teams. The paper introduces a three-phase scheduling process that produces a solution better than the official schedule by minimizing and balancing travel distance and breaks while meeting more requirements.",{"@graph":63,"@context":118},[64,80,101],{"@type":65,"itemListElement":66},"BreadcrumbList",[67,71,74,77],{"item":68,"name":69,"@type":70,"position":9},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":72,"name":10,"@type":70,"position":73},"https://docshare.wps.com/template/",2,{"item":75,"name":11,"@type":70,"position":76},"https://docshare.wps.com/template/presentations/",3,{"item":78,"name":59,"@type":70,"position":79},"https://docshare.wps.com/template/scheduling-the-australian-football-league-abstract-and-3-phase-scheduling-approach/393331/",4,{"url":78,"name":59,"@type":81,"image":82,"author":87,"headline":59,"publisher":90,"fileFormat":93,"inLanguage":57,"description":61,"dateModified":94,"datePublished":95,"encodingFormat":93,"isAccessibleForFree":96,"interactionStatistic":97},"DigitalDocument",{"url":83,"@type":84,"width":85,"height":86},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/scheduling-the-australian-football-league-abstract-and-3-phase-scheduling-approach/393331.png","ImageObject",442,249,{"name":88,"@type":89},"Anna Hans","Person",{"url":68,"name":91,"@type":92},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-19","2026-09-26",true,{"@type":98,"interactionType":99,"userInteractionCount":79},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":100},"ViewAction",{"@type":102,"mainEntity":103},"FAQPage",[104,110,114],{"name":105,"@type":106,"acceptedAnswer":107},"Why is scheduling the Australian Football League considered especially difficult?","Question",{"text":108,"@type":109},"It combines a single round robin with additional mixed matches and involves teams with multiple home venues, including venues shared by multiple teams, which complicates travel, fairness, and constraint satisfaction.","Answer",{"name":111,"@type":106,"acceptedAnswer":112},"What does the paper propose for creating an AFL schedule?",{"text":113,"@type":109},"It presents a three-phase process to generate schedules, targeting reduced and better-balanced travel distance and breaks while satisfying more requirements.",{"name":115,"@type":106,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How is the AFL scheduling problem modeled in the paper?",{"text":117,"@type":109},"It is treated as a Constrained Sports Scheduling Problem (CSSP), aiming for feasible schedules without hard constraint violations and minimizing a weighted sum of soft constraint violations.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":78,"og:type":120,"og:title":59,"og:site_name":91,"og:description":61},"article",{"robots":122,"canonical":78},"index,follow",{"doc_id":124,"site_id":56},393331,1791739509,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":127},{"doc_id":124,"user_id":128,"nickname":88,"user_avatar":129,"doc_module":9,"category_id":8,"category_name":11,"doc_title":59,"doc_description":61,"doc_content":130,"file_id":131,"file_url":132,"file_type":133,"file_size":134,"view_count":79,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":9,"is_downloadable":9,"audit_status":9,"page_count":25,"language":135,"language_code":57,"site_id":56,"html_lang":57,"table_of_contents":136,"faqs":137,"seo_title":138,"seo_description":61,"update_tm":139,"read_time":47},5909892332657,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_994ba38a5ba835b3df7d355c54d3ed8d","Scheduling the Australian Football League  \nJari Kyngäs 1, Kimmo Nurmi 1, Nico Kyngäs 1,George Lilley2, Thea Salter3, Dries Goossens4  \n1 Satakunta University of Applied Sciences, Tiedepuisto 3, 28600 Pori, Finland  \n2 Box Hill Senior Secondary College, 19 Dunloe Avenue, Mont Albert North 3129, Australia  \n3 AFL HOUSE, 140 Harbour Esplanade, Docklands VIC 3008, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia  \n4 Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium  \nAbstract. Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, such as higher attendance and TV viewership, lower costs, and increased fairness. The Australian Football League is particularly interesting because of an unusual competition format integrating a single round robin tournament with additional games. Furthermore, several teams have multiple home venues and some venues are shared by multiple teams. This paper presents a 3-phase process to schedule the Australian Football League. The resulting solution outperforms the official schedule with respect to minimizing and balancing travel distance and breaks, while satisfying more requirements.  \nKeywords: Sports, Timetabling, Multiple Venues, Travel distance, Heuristics.  \n1 Introduction  \nAustralian Rules football (officially Australian football) was invented in Melbourne, Australia, and first played in 1858 (Blainey, 2010) . The history of the Australian Football League (AFL) dates back to 1897, but games have been played in some kind of league format since 1877. Originally intended to keep the cricketers fit during winter time, Australian football soon became highly popular in Australia, and is now practised in large parts of the world. When measured by attendance, it is by far the most popular sport in Australia. The spectator average per match for the season 2013 was 33,500 . The most popular matches in the regular season have more than 80,000 spectators.  \nAs have many professional sports leagues, the Australian Football League (AFL) has become a big business. Accordingly, the quality of the schedules has become increasingly important, as the schedule has a direct impact on revenue for all involved parties. For instance, the number of spectators in the stadia and the travelling costs for the teams are influenced by the schedule, and TV networks that pay for broadcasting rights want the most attractive games to be scheduled at commercially interesting times. Scheduling the Australian Football League is a very demanding task. It has in fact been claimed to be the most difficult mathematical problem in world sport by the Herald Sun1. Not surprisingly, the problem of scheduling sport leagues has drawn the attention of an increasing number of researchers. Nurmi et al. (2010) report on a growing number of cases in which academic researchers have been able to close a scheduling contract with a professional sports league owner.  \n1 “Supercomputers tackle toughest mathemathics problem in world sport-the AFL draw”. See [http://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/supercomputers-tackle-toughest-mathemathics-problem-in](http://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/supercomputers-tackle-toughest-mathemathics-problem-in)world-sport-the-afl-draw/story-fnelctok-1226500295493 (Published 22.10.2012)  \nIn a sports tournament, n teams play against each other over a period of time according to a given timetable. The teams belong to a league, which organizes games or matches between the teams. Each game consists of an ordered pair of teams, denoted i-j, where team i plays at home-that is, uses its own venue (stadium) for a game-and team j plays away. In a round robin tournament each team plays against every other team a fixed number of times. Most sports leagues play a double round robin tournament, where the teams meet once at home and once away. Games are grouped in rounds, which are played on one or more consecutive days (usually","cbCaigdfcB44GaK2","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaigdfcB44GaK2","pdf",620974,"English","# 1 Introduction\n## Tournament and schedule definitions\n## Constrained Sports Scheduling Problem (CSSP)\n## AFL-specific features","[{\"question\":\"Why is scheduling the Australian Football League considered especially difficult?\",\"answer\":\"It combines a single round robin with additional mixed matches and involves teams with multiple home venues, including venues shared by multiple teams, which complicates travel, fairness, and constraint satisfaction.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the paper propose for creating an AFL schedule?\",\"answer\":\"It presents a three-phase process to generate schedules, targeting reduced and better-balanced travel distance and breaks while satisfying more requirements.\"},{\"question\":\"How is the AFL scheduling problem modeled in the paper?\",\"answer\":\"It is treated as a Constrained Sports Scheduling Problem (CSSP), aiming for feasible schedules without hard constraint violations and minimizing a weighted sum of soft constraint violations.\"}]","Scheduling the Australian Football League - Abstract and 3-Phase Scheduling Approach | PDF",1790383500]