How would you specify scheduling rules in a text sim?

[aran]

Designing and programming an American football sim is one of my personal just-for-fun projects. I've been designing the sim engine in spare moments for the past couple of years. The sim aims for league customization (mainly league size, organization, and scheduling) to be a selling point.

A unique problem presents itself when you allow players to customize leagues to such an extent: how the devil do you do scheduling customization in a reasonably user-friendly way for leagues sized from 4 to 50 teams in any symmetrical organizational scheme?

I've spent several hours designing a language that would allow you to specify in relatively plain language how scheduling should work--and that's without knowing league size and organization before hand. The primary test case has been expressing the NFL scheduling rules in the language. This test case is surprisingly hard to make work in an elegant fashion without resorting to some funkiness.

When dealing with variable organizational structures, it's necessary to have a language that can specify rules that will be impossible to fulfill given certain league structures (if you have one conference and two divisions but try to use NFL rules, for instance). I'm not really worried about this eventuality--I'll make that sacrifice to have a flexible system.

I'm not concerned about ensuring that X games are played regardless of the structure fed into the scheduling algorithm. If you have an NFL structure with all divisions containing six teams, you're going to have a longer schedule if you run the NFL scheduling rules on it.

These considerations in mind, what do you think is a reasonable way to allow players to specify scheduling rules in a text-sim that tries to be as flexible as possible?

(In before Maximum Football comments. I've already solicited the assistance of Daivd Winters.)

[Marc Vaughan]

The system I've used is simply a mathematical algorithm which was described in a very old football league pamphlet, I'm sure you can find it (or similar alternatives) if you look around online.

If you're feeling flashy there's an entire lecture/book on it here by the looks of things ...

Sports leagues scheduling: models ... - Google Books

[aran]

That's almost exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks Marc!