Scheduling a major college basketball conference

The nine universities in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) have a basketball competition in which each school plays home and away games against each other over a nine-week period. The creation of a suitable schedule is a very difficult problem with a myriad of conflicting requirements and preferences. We develop an approach to scheduling problems that uses a combination of integer programming and enumerative techniques. Our approach yields reasonable schedules very quickly and gave a schedule that was accepted by the ACC for play in 1997-1998.