Constraint Satisfaction for Requirement Handling of Football Fixture Lists

摘要

The fixture lists for the Dutch Professional Football League are constructedbased on a so-called clustering method. This approach consists of three basic steps for which the division of the requirements of the League into hard demands and soft wishes is rather important. Such a division is needed because the scheduling is over-determined due to conflicting interests of the parties involved and quality demands. Research has been carried out to use Constraint Satsifaction, more specificly Constraint Logic Programming, for constructing the fixture lists based on commercial available software packages such as CHIP (Constraint Satisfaction in Prolog). The conclusions of the investigations are that this kind of package supplies correct answers for a given set of hard and medium requirements in a reasonable amount of time. The power of constraint logic programming is that it uses consistency techniques which reduces the solution space.