FriarTuck develops FTSchedulerX catering to the NCAA Conferences

FriarTuck has launched the online trial version of FTSchedulerX. The software is targeted for meeting the unique scheduling requirements of NCAA Division 1 and 2 conferences. The software has been recently used to generate schedules for the Big East Conference, one of the premier Division 1 NCAA conferences in the United States.

Some of the salient features of the new software are as follows:
1. Powerful search engine
2. Advanced solving features
3. Intuitive graphical interfaces
4. Completely online
5. Export features
6. Supported Constraints

About Big East

The tournament consists of 14 College Basketball Teams located in the U.S. east coast. Each team play all the other teams at least once with an additional of 3 repeat games (10 teams once and 3 teams twice). The 16 game pairing scheduled for a team is balanced such that 8 games are played at home and the other 8 are played away.

The NCAA basketball season starts from November up to March of the following year. The regular season begins in January and finished by early March to have enough time for the play-offs. The 2003-2004 regular season starts from the 5th of January up to the 7th of March 2004, which is a full 9 weeks. Each team can only play twice a week, which the days are grouped as Weekdays (Monday to Thursday) and Weekends (Saturday or Sunday). The regular season that spans for 9 weeks has 54 possible game days and has 18 play dates (both Weekdays and Weekends groups). During the regular season, some teams will need to play non-conference games that would also use some of the play dates.

Scheduling Features

Arena Availability: The availability of an arena to accommodate a team hosting a game. Teams are allowed to have multiple hosting arenas and are allowed to assign specific opponents to each arena.

TV Network: Television Networks give a list of games that will be televised nationally and should be fixed to particular days. In addition to the fixed games, day and time conflicts with other national sport like NBA, NHL, MLB and NFL should be avoided as to increase audience availability and possible local television coverage.

Fair Schedule: Providing a fair schedule demands a certain level of quality for all the teams. The schedule for each team should be similar and should not compromise its chances in winning the tournament.

Schedule Optimization: Providing ways to further improve the schedule. A specific point system is used to analyze each schedule for automatic comparison.