A Decision Support System for Scheduling the Canadian Football League

Abstract

The eight-team Canadian Football League (CFL) features an 18-game regular season played between late June and early November. The regular-season schedule is manually created using an iterative process involving league management, teams, and a television sports broadcaster. We developed a mixed-integer program-driven decision support system that provided league officials with multiple schedule versions relatively quickly. Our approach informed the development of the regular-season schedule by offering league management a neighborhood of potentially solid solutions. We demonstrated the impact of specific schedule requests to decision makers. Such sensitivity analysis was impossible under the previous manual creation method.