The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) represents the fundamental issues
involved in creating a schedule for sports leagues where the amount of team
travel is an issue. For many of these leagues, the scheduling problem includes
a myriad of constraints based on thousands of games and hundreds of team
idiosyncrasies that vary in their content and importance from year to year, but
at its heart are two basic requirements. The first is a feasibility issue in that
the home and away pattern must be sufficiently varied so as to avoid long home
stands and road trips. The second is the goal of preventing excessive travel. For
simplicity, we state this objective as minimize total travel distance.