Praying to the Gods of Schedule Design

[professor ape]

Wish me luck. To kill time before the upcoming release I have been working on designing a 162 game schedule for a 30 team league with two leagues of three divisions each. The challenge is working with five team divisions.

I have set it up with 18 games against division rivals, six games against the other teams in the league and 30 interleague games. The interleague is 3 games against ten interleague opponents, the five teams in the geographic match (East vs. East, etc) and one other division alternating year to year.

After about 15 hours of work the interleague games and the interdivision games are all scheduled and I have the division games done for one of the six divisions. I'm pretty confident that I won't hit any critical issues with the rest of the schedule but it has been very challenging to keep the homestands and road trips in line and to avoid getting stuck with any back-to-back series with the same matchup.

Send me all of the karma that you can as I work to wrap this up. I just can't wait to enter the schedule into the new game!

[theasfl]

Ive done the logistics for many a schedule in my day, its the coding that makes me quite sad.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by professor ape

Wish me luck. To kill time before the upcoming release I have been working on designing a 162 game schedule for a 30 team league with two leagues of three divisions each. The challenge is working with five team divisions.

Here's something you may not realize: even though it might seem you need an interleague series going on each half of the week, that's not necessarily true. By a judicious use of two-game series for the first part of the week, you can arrange things so that the interleague series only happens at the end of the week (i.e. Fri-Sat-Sun). Take a lot of juggling to work though , and you can only do it for perhaps four to six weeks, otherwise you wind up with too may two-game series.

[professor ape]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Here's something you may not realize: even though it might seem you need an interleague series going on each half of the week, that's not necessarily true. By a judicious use of two-game series for the first part of the week, you can arrange things so that the interleague series only happens at the end of the week (i.e. Fri-Sat-Sun). Take a lot of juggling to work though , and you can only do it for perhaps four to six weeks, otherwise you wind up with too may two-game series.

I thought about that one but you run into other issues like five-game weeks, having two consecutive days off or (as you note) a slew of two-game series.

I don't mind having at least one interleague series going on at some point. During the first and the last couple of weeks of the season there is just one running at any given time. Also, I am making sure that the matchup for the interleague series that start and finish the season are geographically close (i.e. two TX teams, two NY teams, etc.)

I'm know that I am not the first person to take on this challenge and I'm sure that there are a number of people who have come up with better solutions to the challenges that this division structure presents. At the same time, I feel that this one of the most challenging division structures to schedule out well and puting the pieces of this puzzle together has been a lot of fun.

It also has eaten up a good bit of time providing a great distraction as we wait for the release date. MARKUS, I'M ALMOST DONE WITH THE SCHEDULE AND WILL HAVE TO GO BACK TO GNAWING OFF MY FINGERNAILS WAITING!! Do you really want to be responsible for the deformation of my hands?