Package: asyroro
Imagine you are organizing a one-day football tournament. Five teams
will come, every team should play every other team, and you only have
one field. This is called an asynchronous round-robin tournament. With
itertools, python makes it easy to print a list of all games:import itertools
list(itertools.combinations(range(5), 2))The output will be:[(0,1), (0,2), (0,3), (0,4), (1,2), (1,3), (1,4), (2,3), (2,4), (3,4)]Here, the first element (0,1) means that team 0 plays against team 1 in
the first game, the second element (0,2) means that team 0 plays against
team 2 in the second game, and so on. Unfortunately, the order of games
is not suitable. Team 0 has to play four games in a row without a rest,
and most other teams also have to play two or more consecutive games. In
contrast, asyroro.py creates a well-balanced schedule.Usage:Execute the scriptasyroro.pyto run a few examples. Adjust the code
to your own needs. For a tournament with 5 teams (called A, B, C, D, E
here), the 10 games of the calculated schedule are:(A-B) (D-C) (E-A) (B-C) (D-E) (C-A) (B-D) (C-E) (A-D) (E-B)Implementation:For an even number of teams, the circle method [1, 2] is used to
generate the schedule. For an odd number of teams, the circle method
does not produce satisfactory results, and the method suggested by
Suksompong [3] is used instead. To balance the schedule according to the
fourth criterion below, a method similar to that for creating a regular
tournament presented by Herke [4] is used.Quality control:Several criteria define the quality of a well-balanced schedule:Guaranteed Rest Time (GRT)As already mentioned above, each team should get a rest before they
have to play again. The minimum rest for any team is the "guaranteed
rest time" GRT [3]. If, for example, the schedule has a GRT of 2, then
every team will have a break of at least 2 games before they have to
play again.For asyroro-generated schedules, GRT = k-2 for an even number of teams
(2k) and GRT = k-1 for an odd number of teams (2k+1).Games-Played Difference (GPD)At any time during the tournament, each team should already have
played a similar number of games. The games-played difference GPD [3]
is the largest such difference that occurs in the schedule.For all asyroro-generated schedules, GPD = 1Rest Difference Index (RDI)When two teams play each other, they had a different rest time before
that game (they cannot have the same rest time, because then they
would have already played against each other in the previous game).
The maximum rest difference that occurs in the schedule is called the
rest difference index RDI [3].For asyroro-generated schedules, RDI = 2 for an even number of teams
and RDI = 1 for an odd number of teams.Tournament Irregularity Index (TII)The two halves of the playing field may not have the same quality, for
example on one side the players would have to look directly into the
setting sun, which is a disadvantage. Therefore, all teams should have
roughly the same number of games in each half. Let’s say the notation
(0-1) means that team 0 plays on the left side and team 1 on the right
side. If the schedule for a tournament with 3 teams is (0-1) (0-2)
(1-2), then the second game needs to be changed in order to get a
balanced schedule: (0-1) (2-0) (1-2). In graph theory, such a balanced
(or almost balanced) schedule is called a regular (or semi-regular)
tournament. Here, I call the maximum difference between games on the
left side and games on the right size for any team the tournament
irregularity index TII.For asyroro-generated schedules, TII = 1 (semi-regular) for an even
number of teams and TII = 0 (regular) for an odd number of teams.References:[1] Arunachalam Y. Tournament schedulinghttps://nrich.maths.org/1443.[2] Wikipedia. Round-robin tournamenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_tournament#Scheduling_algorithm.[3] W. Suksompong. Scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments.
Operations Research Letters, 44:96100, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orl.2015.12.008.[4] S. Herke. Fun with graphs, 2014https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpariULmPI.The project avatar was taken fromhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4-tournament.svg.