College basketball scheduling with travel swings

The Missouri Valley Conference uses travel swings, in which a team plays two opponents during one road trip, to reduce the expenses for their college basketball programs. While these swings are financially beneficial, they significantly complicate the scheduling process. In particular, the swings alter the structure of the schedule by allowing games to occur outside of the standard time slots into which games are typically assigned. An integer programming formulation was developed that incorporates these swings into the scheduling problem. This program was solved efficiently by assigning swings first, then fitting remaining games around the swings. This generated a large number of candidate schedules, one of which was used for the 2001 season.