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Fair draws for group rounds in sport tournaments
Author(s) -
Laliena Pablo,
López F. Javier
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
international transactions in operational research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.032
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1475-3995
pISSN - 0969-6016
DOI - 10.1111/itor.12565
Subject(s) - partition (number theory) , group (periodic table) , football , tournament , heuristic , mathematical economics , mathematics , operations research , scheme (mathematics) , computer science , mathematical optimization , combinatorics , political science , law , mathematical analysis , chemistry , organic chemistry
We propose two draw systems for the group round of sport tournaments where there are some geographical and/or seeding restrictions. One of the systems, related to the equal‐sum partition problem, is “perfect,” since it yields perfectly balanced groups. The other system, which uses the classical scheme of extracting teams from pots, is heuristic and gives results where the groups have very similar scores. We apply our results to Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Soccer World Cups and show that our proposals are much better than the FIFA system and also outperform other recently developed systems.