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IMA Journal of Management Mathematics Advance Access originally published online on September 26, 2008
IMA Journal of Management Mathematics 2009 20(2):213-232; doi:10.1093/imaman/dpn020
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© The authors 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. All rights reserved.

This article appears in the following IMA Journal of Management Mathematics issue: Special Issue Mathematics in Sport [View the issue table of contents]

Organization of a college baseball tournament

J. Cole Smith{dagger}

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA

{dagger} Email: cole{at}ise.ufl.edu

Received on 16 August 2007. Accepted on 28 July 2008.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association baseball tournament involves 64 teams representing American universities and colleges in a series of win-and-advance weekend tournaments. In the first weekend, a four-team ‘regional’ tournament is played at a host institution. The 16 regionals are also paired a priori, with the winners of paired regionals playing in the second weekend at one of the two institutions’ home sites. The eight teams remaining after the second weekend play a final tournament at a neutral location. Given a selection of 64 tournament teams and their seeding classifications, prohibited four-team groupings during the first weekend and prohibited regional pairings in the second weekend, we examine the problem of creating regionals and regional pairings in order to minimize expected team travel costs. The problem is modelled as a non-linear mixed-integer program and solved by a combinatorial cutting plane approach. We examine the performance and output of the proposed algorithm on 2006 and 2007 tournament data.

Keywords: integer programming; non-linear programming; cutting planes; sports


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