Future Scheduling for CSVA seasonsIn the fall of 2011, the late Bob Reinman approached Dr. Mike Trick, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a renowned athletic scheduling expert. Bob told Trick about the CSVA scheduling issues and got his interest. Trick assigned graduate students Hiroshi Higuchi, Nana Ampaw, Kunal Kande and Alan Pruce to the problem. Also involved was Willem-Jan van Hoeve, another faculty member at CMU. A scheduling model was developed using MicroSoft Excel for the statement of the problem. The spread sheets were then imported into AIMMS, an optimization technology involving linear and integer programming. AIMMS is commercial software but available for academic use and runs on Windows systems. AIMMS is used widely by large companies and is prohibitavely expensive for CSVA to use. In 2012 the AIMMS model solved the scheduling problem for CSVA after running for 7.5 hours. The results, however, were a month too late for actual use.In 2013 Art Smoot, the current CSVA scheduling officer, discussed the CSVA problem and the CMU model with his son, a PhD in Systems Engineering. Art hired/bribed him to convert the CMU model to interface with LPSolve, open source and free interger optimizing software. He did the conversion and Art massaged the source data (teams, gym assignments, constraints) into something his son's software code could use. They tried running the LPSolve model for the data for the fall 2013 10 week season. Wisely Art also began the manual task simultaneously, which is what ultimately was used. Art terminated the converted LPSolve model after it had been running for 175 hours without creating a solution or giving intermediate results. The conclusion was that either LPSolve did not include the proprietary code in AIMMS that allowed it to complete, or that the model conversion had errors, or the model itself had limitations specific to the 2011 formulation. The development of this continues, but it is not considered a feasible solution yet. Some additional documentation on the LPSolve interface attempt is here. Art would welcome the assitance of anyone in CSVA who might be interested in working on this problem or who would be interested in doing the scheduling in the future. please feel free to contact Art and let him know. |
