Morteza Davari is an Associate Professor of Operations Research at SKEMA Business School. He is a researcher at the SKEMA Centre for Analytics and Management Science. His research interests lie in Combinatorial Optimisation, Stochastic Optimisation, Artificial Intelligence, and Complexity Theory. Recently, he investigated Fairness in Sports and the Planning of Sports Venues.
Could you tell us more about your field of research, particularly Fairness in Sports?
Every sports competition needs a schedule, stating who will play whom, when, and where. Depending on the constraints that need to be considered, scheduling a single league can be quite challenging. In many sports competitions, teams often face issues related to fairness, such as the distances they need to travel for games and the varying levels of difficulty in their schedules. Fairness in sports planning, much like in the allocation of indivisible goods, involves balancing the interests and preferences of different entities.
One example is the planning of a multi-league competition. While professional sports usually have only a handful of leagues, in amateur sports or youth competitions, the number of leagues and matches can be very large. For instance, in the Belgian soccer association, each province is responsible for scheduling the matches of its youth and amateur teams. A single province may harbour hundreds of clubs that collectively have over 5000 teams, distributed across hundreds of leagues, resulting in tens of thousands of matches in one season. In these leagues, clubs typically have several teams (e.g., based on age or skill of the players); however, all teams from the same club share the same infrastructure. This creates a capacity problem at each club: a club has a limit on the number of matches it can host at any given time, which typically follows from its number of fields. These capacity constraints create interdependencies between the leagues, making it challenging to schedule all leagues while considering these capacities. We aim to find an assignment of teams to home away patterns, such that the capacity violations of teams are minimised.
What results surprised you the most?
Given the enormous size and complexity of league scheduling problems, I expected the solution to be of higher orders of complexity. However, the study proved this wrong and showed that planning thousands of leagues can be classified as “easy” (i.e., solvable in polynomial time) when the home-away pattern is complementary, and the size of all leagues is an even number. This is a crucial result as it brings hope for researchers interested in studying more complicated versions of the problem, where the proposed algorithm could play an important role in efficiently solving subproblems.
What is the research you are currently carrying out?
I am currently studying fairness in the upcoming expansion of the NBA. The distance travelled by teams for away games is a crucial aspect of fairness in the NBA. Some teams may frequently travel long distances, affecting their performance due to fatigue and disrupted routines. A fair scheduling system would aim to distribute travel distances more evenly among teams, ensuring that no team faces a disproportionate burden of exhausting journeys.
With the upcoming expansion of the NBA, the structure of the league will undergo fundamental changes. The impact of this new structure on the schedule and the distance travelled by each NBA team are thus being studied, aiming to find a perfect league structure in which travel distances are fairly distributed.
How does this study impact society at large?
The research on fairness in sports scheduling impacts various stakeholders, including teams, players, coaches, clubs, fans, and communities. By reducing travel fatigue and ensuring more balanced competition, players’ performance and well-being are enhanced, while coaches can better plan training and recovery sessions. Clubs benefit from efficient resource management and cost savings, allowing for improved facilities and player development. Fans enjoy increased engagement and accessible game times, and local economies benefit from evenly distributed home games. Overall, fair schedules promote more competitive and enjoyable sports environments for all involved.