Friar Tuck 1.1: A Constraint-based Round Robin Planner

Martin Henz
School of Computing

The Problem

In round robin sport competitions, each team plays each other one or several times, according to a rigid scheme. The coordinators of such tournaments often have to deal with a host of requirements from the participating teams, the fans and the media. The result is a combinatorial search problem of considerable complexity.

Friar Tuck

Friar Tuck is a generic round robin tournament planner that allows to conveniently enter a variety of constraints. Friar Tuck allows the coordinator of sport tournaments to compute optimal solutions to complex tournament planning problems. Friar Tuck is based on constraint programming and implemented in the concurrent constraint language Oz, using the programming system Mozart.

Highlights

  • Powerful search engine: Friar Tuck is able to compute plans for single and double round robin tournaments with up to 30 teams (on a PC with usual configuration). The underlying technology of constraint programming allows to make use of constraints specified by the user during the search process.
  • Many useful constraints: Friar Tuck allows to specify a host of constraints, ranging from simple fixing of opponents to complex sequence constraints that avoid successive matches against strong teams.
  • Rich graphical editors: Friar Tuck provides a number of graphical editors for defining constraints quickly and conveniently.
  • Tutorial introduction: Friar Tuck now comes with a tutorial introduction that explains its features step by step.
  • ACC 98: A difficult benchmark problem, the ACC 98 problem described by G. NEMHAUSER AND M. TRICK: Scheduling a major college basketball conference, Operations Research 46(1), 1998, can now be entered in Friar Tuck. Friar Tuck finds all 179 solutions of the problem within one minute on a PC with usual configuration. The ACC 98 problem is used throughout the tutorial introduction as example.
  • Generates web pages: Friar Tuck is now able to save computed tournament timetables as web pages in HTML format for easy display and communication.

Download

Friar Tuck is distributed free of charge. No warranties are implied or expressly given. A license agreement is contained in the distribution.

Latest release is 1.1, available for Unix and Windows 95/98.
Release 1.1 binaries (2.6 MB)
for Windows95/98 (self installing)
Release 1.1 binaries (2 MB each)
for Solaris Sparc
Release 1.1 sources
for users of Mozart 1.0 (600 kB)

Papers
Paper on a Case Study Paper on Friar Tuck
Tutorial Introduction A tutorial introduction to Friar Tuck leads you step by step through its features using many examples. In addition, Friar Tuck comes with a number of on-line demos, ranging from simple to complex and large problems.

Snap Shots Friar Tuck's user interface allows to navigate conveniently through the control panel for different solution phases.

Team-specific constraints can be entered using a graphical editor. Constraint propagation can be activated interactively and the resulting constraints are visualized.
The computed timetables are displayed in a window as follows. Friar Tuck allows to save timetables in HTML format.
Feedback

Friar Tuck 1.1 is distributed free of charge, including the sources. Please let me know if you are making or wanting improvements, found interesting applications, encountered problems and limitations in using and extending the software, or can provide or would like to have support for a platform other than the ones currently supported.

Funding

This work is currently funded through the project ReAlloc.


Martin Henz