Scheduling fixtures for Basketball New Zealand

This paper describes the problem faced every year by Basketball New Zealand in scheduling the National Basketball League fixtures. This is a combinatorial optimization problem with few constraints but many objectives, which are described in detail. Two features of the problem cause particular difficulty—the requirement that every team plays two matches in at least two rounds during the season and the fact that stadium availability is far from certain at the start of the process and must be negotiated once a draft schedule has been produced, necessitating an iterative process with possibly many drafts before the final schedule is confirmed.