Scheduling the Finnish Major Ice Hockey League Using the PEAST Algorithm

Good schedules have many benefits for the league, such as higher incomes, lower costs and more interesting and fairer seasons. Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task and requires computational intelligence to generate an acceptable schedule. There are a multitude of stakeholders with varying requests (and often requests vary significantly year on year). This paper presents the format played in the Finnish major ice hockey league in the 2013–2014 season. The paper describes the PEAST algorithm which have been used to schedule the league since the 2008–2009 season. We report our computational results especially for the 2013–2014 season.