Event Details

Management Science seminar with Frits Spieksma

Abstract: Soccer has become a major business involving many stakeholders, such as teams, police, fans, sponsors, and broadcasting companies. Huge amounts of money are being paid for the broadcasting rights, illustrating the economic value of soccer competitions. This fact also emphasizes the relevance of finding a good and fair schedule. One property relating to the fairness of a round-robin schedule is the so-called carry-over effect value. The carry-over effect value is a number that can be associated to any round-robin schedule; it represents a degree of unbalancedness of the schedule with respect to carry-over. We illustrates the carry-over effect on different cases in practice, and we prove that, for an even number of teams, the Circle Method generates a schedule with maximum carry-over effect value.

Bio: Frits Spieksma is professor in Combinatorial Optimization in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUe).He obtained his PhD from Maastricht University in 1992, and was, prior to moving to TUe, a full professor at KU Leuven (Belgium). His research interest is combinatorial optimization and operations research, and he combines an interest in theoretical results with the desire to affect practice.

He is founder of the EURO Working Group OR in Sports, serves on the editorial board of a number of journals, and has published around a 100 papers in scientific journals.