Algorithms and Software for the Golf Director Problem

The golf director problem introduced in Pavlikov et al. (2014) is a sports management problem that aims to find an allocation of golf players into fair teams for certain golf club competitions. The motivation for the problem is that club golf competitions are recreational events where the golf director wants to form teams that are competitive even though the players are of different skill levels, as measured by their USGA (http://www.usga.org) or R&A (http://www.randa.org) handicaps. We present an efficient simulation and optimization-based procedure that finds a near-optimal fair team allocation. A computer implementation of the proposed solution method is publicly available and located at http://www.fairgolfteams.com. The website provides a golf director with a variety of controls to manage and run club golf competitions in a fair way. Computational results of allocating real sets of golfers into teams are presented in a demonstration of the website.

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