{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/practical-algorithms-with-guaranteed","title":"Practical Algorithms with Guaranteed Approximation Ratio for TTP with Maximum Tour Length Two","arxiv_id":"2212.12240","date":"2022-12-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jingyang Zhao","Mingyu Xiao"],"abstract":"The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a hard but interesting sports scheduling problem inspired by Major League Baseball, which is to design a double round-robin schedule such that each pair of teams plays one game in each other's home venue, minimizing the total distance traveled by all $n$ teams ($n$ is even). In this paper, we consider TTP-2, i.e., TTP under the constraint that at most two consecutive home games or away games are allowed for each team. We propose practical algorithms for TTP-2 with improved approximation ratios. Due to the different structural properties of the problem, all known algorithms for TTP-2 are different for $n/2$ being odd and even, and our algorithms are also different for these two cases. For even $n/2$, our approximation ratio is $1+3/n$, improving the previous result of $1+4/n$. For odd $n/2$, our approximation ratio is $1+5/n$, improving the previous result of $3/2+6/n$. In practice, our algorithms are easy to implement. Experiments on well-known benchmark sets show that our algorithms beat previously known solutions for all instances with an average improvement of $5.66\\%$.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12240v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.12240v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"practical-algorithms-with-guaranteed","repo_url":"https://github.com/jingyangzhao/ttp-2","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}