The Traveling Tournament Problem: An Overview
Abstract
Over the past 25 years, the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) has become one of the most extensively studied optimization problems in sports scheduling. At its core, the TTP seeks to minimize the total travel distance incurred by teams that travel directly between opponents' venues during consecutive away games. The problem originated from the scheduling challenges faced by Major League Baseball, where it was identified as the central computational difficulty. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on the TTP. We review the principal problem variants and benchmark instances, and summarize the current state of the art in lower bounds, approximation guarantees, and exact and heuristic optimization algorithms. Moreover, we contribute to the continued development of the field by tracking and validating lower and upper bounds, while succeeding the repository originally established by Prof. Michael Trick as part of the RobinX sports timetabling project. Finally, we identify several open questions and outline promising directions for future research.
Related
- Exact cost of the Euclidean Maximum Traveling Salesman Problem in one dimension
- Traveling Salesman Problem on Graphs with Proportional Independent Set
- On the Segment-Based Remove-and-Reinsert Heuristic for the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem
- Closing All-Exp Gaps in Local Search for the Traveling Salesman Problem and Maximum Constraint Assignment
- ROAR: Restricted 2-Opt And Ruin-and-recreate Heuristic for Large and Extreme Scale Traveling Repairman Problem
BibTeX
@misc{bulck2026traveling,
title = {{The Traveling Tournament Problem: An Overview}},
author = {David Van Bulck and Fan Yang and Dries Goossens and Michael Trick},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.03612},
eprint = {2609.03612},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03612},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Traveling Tournament Problem: An Overview
AU - David Van Bulck
AU - Fan Yang
AU - Dries Goossens
AU - Michael Trick
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.03612
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03612
AB - Over the past 25 years, the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) has become one of the most extensively studied optimization problems in sports scheduling. At its core, the TTP seeks to minimize the total travel distance incurred by teams that travel directly between opponents' venues during consecutive away games. The problem originated from the scheduling challenges faced by Major League Baseball, where it was identified as the central computational difficulty. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on the TTP. We review the principal problem variants and benchmark instances, and summarize the current state of the art in lower bounds, approximation guarantees, and exact and heuristic optimization algorithms. Moreover, we contribute to the continued development of the field by tracking and validating lower and upper bounds, while succeeding the repository originally established by Prof. Michael Trick as part of the RobinX sports timetabling project. Finally, we identify several open questions and outline promising directions for future research.
ER -