The Stable Tournament Problem: Matching sports schedules with preferences

By combining sports scheduling with stable matching literature, this article defines the Stable Tournament Problem, which attempts to find a schedule of games that is stable with respect to teams' preferences. In every round of a stable schedule, no pair of teams who have not played against each other has to play against less preferable opponents. An integer linear model is formulated and results are provided for instances with random preferences and preferences structured according to the strength of the teams.