Scheduling Softball Series in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference

The Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference is a Division II National Collegiate Athletic Association conference that offers, inter alia, women's softball. Within the conference, four-game series are played against every other conference team according to a temporally constrained schedule. Manually generated schedules result in imbalances, such as breaks of multiple home or away series and away-series season openers and closers for the same team, and fail to mitigate weather-related series disruptions. Our integer-programming–based schedules eliminate these problems while ensuring that all requisite series are played. In this paper, we present a 40-game schedule; we do not present 36- and 44-game schedules, which are nearly equivalent. For its 2011 softball season, the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference adopted the 40-game schedule from these three schedules.