Operational Research Applied to Sports

Through key research papers from Palgrave's Journal of Operational Research, this book showcases how Operational Research can be applied to sports in a variety of ways, including: timetabling fixtures; scheduling officials; forecasting outcomes; optimizing tactics and strategy; analyzing the effects of rules and laws; planning issues, and performance measurement. The introductory chapter provides a broad overview with an examination of how this area has developed over time, and a look at its wide ranging applications to sports including football, tennis and cricket etc.

Mike Wright is Professor of Operational Research at Lancaster University and has researched extensively in the area of OR in Sports since 1989. His main interests are: the practical implementations of sports timetabling and scheduling using complex metaheuristic methods; the analysis of tactics and strategy in sport; and the analysis of the potential and actual effects of changes in sporting rules and laws. He has published numerous papers in the area in a variety of top international academic journals, and presented papers at many international conferences. Mike has worked with the England and Wales Cricket Board since 1990, timetabling cricket fixtures and allocating umpires, and has done similar work for New Zealand Cricket, Basketball New Zealand, New Zealand Rugby Union, the Minor Counties Cricket Association, the Devon Cricket League, the Home Counties Cricket League and the ICC Cricket World Cups in 1999 and 2007.

1. Introduction
2. The Optimal Aiming Line
3. Planning Urban Recreational Facilities With Integer Goal Programming
4. Using Hypergames To Model Difficult Social Issues: An Approach To The Case Of Soccer Hooliganism.
5. Optimal Strategies For The Game Of Darts
6. Dynamic Programming In One-Day Cricket – Optimal Scoring Rates
7. Scheduling English Cricket Umpires
8. Computer Forecasting Of Australian Rules Football For A Daily Newspaper
9. Timetabling County Cricket Fixtures Using A Form Of Tabu Search
10. A Fair Method For Resetting The Target In Interrupted One-Day Cricket Matches
11. Measuring The Performance Of Nations At The Summer Olympics Using Data Envelopment Analysis
12. The Professional Foul In Football – Tactics And Deterrents
13. A Mathematical Analysis Of Badminton Scoring Systems
14. A Branch-And-Price Algorithm For Scheduling Sport Leagues
15. Optimal Challenges In Tennis