Development of a Heuristic Algorithm to Automate and Improve the Scheduling Process for Tennis Clubs : A Practical Operations Research Thesis with a Case Study at a Padel Club

Abstract: The scheduling of a tennis school’s operation at a general tennis club is today done manually. This is a time consuming task, usually taking 2-4 weeks for the person responsible. This thesis aims to mathematically formulate the tennis school scheduling problem (TSSP), and to develop a computer based solution procedure to automate the scheduling process. The mathematical formulation of the problem has the structure of an optimization problem and the solution procedure that is developed is a heuristic algorithm for the specific purpose of this problem. Furthermore, a heuristic local search algorithm to improve the initial solution is developed, and the model is then tested on real data in a case study at a padel club in Stockholm. Furthermore, the result from the solution procedure is compared with the manually created schedule by the club on some key parameters from the mathematical model. The computerized solution procedure outperformed the manual scheduling procedure in terms of execution time and most of the times in the objective value of the generated schedule. In terms of the mathematical formulation neither the manually created schedule nor the schedules created by the algorithm gives feasible solutions to the problem. However, the padel club deems the schedules usable and will continue with the ongoing process to implement the model.