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Scheduling Umpire Crews for Professional Tennis Tournaments

Culverhouse College of Business, University of Alabama, Box 870226, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0226
College of Engineering, Auburn University, 207 Dunstan Hall, Auburn, Alabama 36849
School of Business Administration, Fort Lewis College, 1000 Rim Drive, Durango, Colorado 81301
afarmer{at}cba.ua.edu
jsmith{at}auburn.edu
miller_l{at}fortlewis.edu

Professional tennis organizations, such as the United States Tennis Association (USTA), the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the International Tennis Federation (ITF), and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), host tennis tournaments throughout the world. At these tournaments, chief umpires assign and schedule line umpires for every match. For most tournaments, they perform this task manually, which can be cumbersome for large tournaments. For large tournaments, such as the US Open, they can use software developed to facilitate scheduling. Unfortunately, the software package currently available often creates suboptimal or infeasible schedules that must be manually adjusted. We developed a program based on optimization that automates the scheduling procedure. Our program consistently provides high-quality schedules in as little as 25 percent of the time taken with other methods.

Key Words: recreation and sports; programming; integer