Japan Professional Football League Optimizes Match Scheduling with ILOG Constraint Programming

ILOG Technology Radically Shortens Scheduling Time from Three Weeks to One Day

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – May 28, 2008 – ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG, Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) announced today that Japan Professional Football League, J. LEAGUE, uses ILOG Constraint Programming (ILOG CP®) optimization software to optimize and streamline match scheduling. Using the new system, J. LEAGUE has been able to shorten scheduling time from three weeks to approximately one day. Optimal scheduling has enabled J. LEAGUE to satisfy the needs of the teams, fans and supporters.

The backbone of the J. LEAGUE Match Scheduling System is ILOG CP, a part of ILOG’s market-leading suite of optimization scheduling software that uses constraint programming techniques to allow J. LEAGUE executives to instantly assess and compare several options before deciding on a final schedule. ILOG JViews™, visualization software from ILOG, is used to provide a more visually-appealing interface for the system. ILOG CP supports time-based constraints that allow organizations to generate optimal schedules with precise activity start-and-stop times.

J. LEAGUE is a top professional football (soccer) league in Japan and one of the most successful leagues in the Asian Football Confederation. The organization recognized a need to automate and streamline its complex match scheduling process, involving 33 teams and 79 schedules, with a total of 682 matches over a 10-month playing season. With no packaged application available for complex scheduling, J. LEAGUE decided on a custom approach based on optimization technology from ILOG. Optimization improves business decision making speed and efficiency by allowing organizations to calculate the best utilization of existing resources – in this case, team personnel, stadiums and spectators.

Before using J. LEAGUE Match Scheduler, all match scheduling for the J. LEAGUE was performed manually and therefore took on an average two to three weeks to complete due to the complexity of the process. In deciding the combination of matches and dates, schedulers needed to juggle many different constraints. Such constraints include avoiding the scheduling of a succession of home games for a team, avoiding simultaneous home games of teams sharing a home stadium or belonging to the same region, as well as taking into consideration situations where stadiums are not available due to maintenance or other seasonal restrictions.

These constraints also changed each year due to the previous year’s match results, the increase or decrease in the number of teams and specific requirements of each team, increasing the complexity of scheduling even further. With the previous method of scheduling, the increase in the number of teams was making it more and more difficult for the schedulers to handle. The new system was to ensure a fair schedule for all the teams, while taking into account each team’s specific requests, such as availability of stadiums and potential conflicts of agendas.

Custom developed by ILOG, the J. LEAGUE Match Scheduler, the proprietary match scheduling software of J. LEAGUE, now makes it possible to create schedules that are optimized to meet the League’s requirements, taking into account the innumerable constraints that need to be considered when scheduling series of games for a given season.

“Arranging a match schedule for 33 teams while satisfying such complex constraints to the fullest extent possible requires a considerable number of simulations, and it was almost impossible to do so manually,” said Atsushi Kawasaki of J. LEAGUE. “ILOG CP and ILOG JViews, which were incorporated into the J. LEAGUE Match Scheduler, have provided schedules of the highest quality, while taking into consideration the basic scheduling rules set by J. LEAGUE and the numerous individual requests of each team. Also, ILOG is able to provide a high level of support to manage the changes of the system needed to improve the quality of our schedules. In addition to a flexible technical support to manage the schedule development task that gets more and more complex every year, we needed the highest performance optimization technology available, which is why we selected ILOG.”

More than 1,000 commercial customers, including 160 members of the Global 500, use ILOG optimization tools, engines and applications to solve the world’s most challenging planning and scheduling problems. These customers include APL, BNSF, JR East, Logistics, Maersk, Schneider, SNCF, United Airlines, the United States Postal Service and UPS in transportation and logistics; and Airbus, Coors, Dell, Hansol Paper, Michelin, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Nippon Steel, Nissan, Porsche, Saint Gobain, Thyssen Krupp, and Toyota in manufacturing. ILOG optimization products are also used by a majority of leading Supply Chain Management software vendors including i2, Infor, Manhattan Associates, JDA, Oracle, Red Prairie and SAP, as well as in research programs at over 1,000 universities around the world, making the products the “gold standard” for performance and solution quality in the Operations Research community. For more information, please visit http://www.ilog.com/products/optimization.

A propos d’ ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 3,000 corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), supply chain and planning and scheduling applications, as well as its optimization and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 850 people worldwide. For more information, please visit www.ilog.com

ILOG, ILOG CP and ILOG JViews are registered trademarks of ILOG S.A. and ILOG, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.