GAINESVILLE:  Dr. Cole Smith, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, will deliver the graduate seminar entitled “A Survey of OR in Sports” on Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 4:05 p.m. in McCarthy Hall A, Room 2186.

This seminar discusses a broad discussion of the use of Operations Research (OR) in sports applications.  Challenges in OR will be discussed along with presenting two problems in more detail.  One regards tournament scheduling for the NCAA basketball tournament, and the other regards a similar problem for the NCAA baseball tournament.  Both models assign teams to positions in the tournament bracket, in order to minimize expected travel time.  The former is naturally modeled as a (large) mixed-integer programming problem, while the latter is a difficult nonlinear mixed-integer program.  A brief description of some valid inequalities and solution techniques to solve these problems will be given.  The overall talk is targeted toward students having only a modest level of OR background, although a fewmathematical programming details will be provided during the talk.