A Benders approach for the constrained minimum break problem

This paper presents a hybrid IP/CP algorithm for designing a double round robin schedule with a minimal number of breaks. Both mirrored and non-mirrored schedules with and without place constraints are considered. The algorithm uses Benders cuts to obtain feasible home-away pattern sets in few iterations and this approach leads to significant reductions in computation time for hard instances. Furthermore, the algorithm is capable of solving a number of previously unsolved benchmark problems for the Traveling Tournament Problem with constant distances.