MSIS 5303 NCAA Class Madness Scheduling - 2018 Each year, there tends to be a fair number of complaints regarding how the NCAA Mens Basketball Committee seeds and schedules teams in the 68-team single elimination tournament to determine the National Champion. It is inevitable that somebody is unhappy. (We wont even begin to discuss the selection process!). Your task for this assignment is to create a LP model that will assign a subset of the 68 teams (the top 16 teams, through #4 seed) to regions and then compare your solution to the actual tournament bracket on a few metrics. You will be using only the 16 teams that are the #1 thru #4 seeds and only considering the 4 regions (not the 8 sub-regions). The criterion used by your model for scheduling teams will be minimizing the sum of distance traveled by all teams to regions, not anything else. Distance and other relevant data is provided on a separate spreadsheet. Below represents the requirements for your model in assigning teams to regions: 1) Each of the four regions (South Atlanta, West LA, East Boston, Midwest Omaha ) will have exactly one #1 seed assigned, exactly one #2 seed assigned , exactly one #3 assigned, and exactly one #4 seed assigned. 2) Teams from the same conference cannot be assigned to the same region. Conferences are shown on the spreadsheet. Conferences with only one team in our scheduling problem can obviously be ignored on this dimension (WCC, Pac-12). 3) The Marquee Q factor Let us consider 7 teams (of the 16) to be marquee teams, meaning they have a national following due to the schools basketball history or the personality of their coach, etc. These 7 teams also have a corresponding Marquee factor (Q) related to a marketing measure of visibility. It is shown on the spreadsheet. We will add a requirement in Part A2 about this factor that you will add to the basic model. Part A - THE BASIC MODEL - Implement an appropriate linear programming model that assigns the 16 teams to Regions, minimizing the sum of overall distances subject to seed and conference requirements. Part A2 The BASICQ MODEL - Add a requirement to each region that the average marquee value of marquee teams assigned to that region must be at least 2.9. Note that this measure includes ONLY THE 7 MARQUEE TEAMS. Part B - THE COMPARISON: Compare how this solution derived from your LP model (both A and A2) differs from the actual assignment of the teams (see actual NCAA tournament bracket notated spreadsheet). Keep in mind we are not assessing which model is better, just assessing each approach with multiple, differing criteria. Specifically, measure the following for both your solutions and the actual bracket (obviously, only the 16 teams of interest). - Total miles (obviously since it is your objective) for all 16 teams combined. - Miles traveled for #1 seeds, #2 seeds, #3 seeds, #4 seeds. Typically, though not always, you would want to have the top teams (#1 seeds) travel the least distance, followed by the #2 seeds, etc. . THIS IS NOT FOR INCLUSION IN YOUR MODEL JUST A COMMENT ABOUT WHY WE ARE MEASURING THIS METRIC POST HOC. - The number of regions, if any, where teams from the same conference are assigned (your solution should not have any). - The number of regions, if any, where the marquee factor calculation is violated (your marquee model solution should be 0 it should be satisfied because you are constraining it in A2!). Also be sure to summarize the team assignments from the output of your models in a nice understandable format (Im thinking a 4 x 4 table would be great). A compare and contrast of the solutions would be good. They likely will differ in subtle ways. Or not so subtle ways.

				ATL	LA	Boston	Omaha
Q	Seed		Conference	South	West	East	MidWest
2	1	Virginia	ACC	444	2224	493	958
	1	Xavier	BEAST	371	1896	740	623
25	1	Nova	BEAST	666	2391	271	1095
	1	KU	B12	703	1319	1285	163
6	2	Cinn	AMER	370	1895	739	624
	2	UNC	ACC	338	2210	618	986
7	2	Purdue	B10	482	1771	832	479
	2	Duke	ACC	348	2218	608	991
	3	Tenn	SEC	155	1939	818	747
	3	Michigan	B10	591	1946	648	636
1	3	Ttech	B12	1005	941	1774	620
	3	MSU	B10	622	1912	684	600
4	4	Arizona	P12	1539	442	2280	1034
	4	Gonzaga	WCC	2181	961	2488	1365
	4	WSU	AMER	775	1196	1423	257
	4	Auburn	SEC	101	1888	1037	833