FleetPairer

FleetPairer is an optimization library, allowing to generate pairing-lists for sailboat racing in a league format.

While enabling fairness in sailing leagues, FleetPairer also allows to optimize pairing lists for efficiency.

Contact

FleetPairer is currently still being developed. While it already generates (provably) fair and efficient pairing-lists, it needs a lot of computation-power to do so.
We are currently working hard on making FleetPairer more efficient. However, this is not easy to achieve while still preserving fairness of the generated pairing-lists.

If you would like to use FleerPairer for your sailing-league, please contact us via E-Mail.

E-Mail: fleetpairer@gmail.com

FleetPairers’s Mission

Fairness

FleetPairers’s main focus lies on making sailing leagues as fair as possible. To do so, the usually used rules had to be strengthened significantly. However, the new and fair rules still satisfy the usually used rules. This allows race-organizers to switch to new pairing-lists without going through the process of adapting their league’s rules.

When speaking of fairness, we usually think of two things:

Each team should directly compete against all other teams equally often
Each team should sail equally often on all boats

Usually, pairing lists are developed manually. This is not only tedious but almost infeasible for realistically sized events. Thus, the above fairness rules are often relaxed s.t. some teams race against each other much more often than others, and the teams don’t sail equally often on all boats. This makes events inherently unfair.

NOTE: Depending on the number of boats, teams and flights in a league, there might not be a perfectly fair pairing-list. Thus, the strict rules developed by FleetPairer permit a deviation of one if necessary.

Efficiency

In league-sailing, there are usually many crew-changes between races. This is clearly necessary, not only if there are more teams competing than boats available, but also to achieve fairness as described above. However, those crew-changes can take up a large portion of race days, especially if the individual races are short.

Thus, FleetPairer uses advanced optimization strategies to keep the total time used for crew-changes down to a minimum.
To do so, FleetPairer may also take the local conditions into account. This is especially useful if only a limited number of crew-changes can be executed concurrently.

The League-Sailing Format

In a sailing-league, a predetermined number of teams compete against each other in a (sometimes fixed) number of so-called flights. The teams race on a fleet of identical boats, provided by the league-organizers.
In each flight, every team sails exactly once. If there are more teams than available boats, a flight may consist of multiple races.
Each team recieves points corresponding to their ranking in the respective race. In the end, the team with the lowest sum of points wins the sailing-league.

NOTE: It is important that only completed flights are counted for the final ranking, s.t. each team competed in the same number of races.

License

Pairing-Lists generated with this software may be used free of charge if and only if FleetPairer is cited accordingly. Include the text
“Generated with FleetPairer by L.Dalbosco
(fleetpairer.com)”
clearly visible on every page of your printed or digital pairing-lists.

FleetPairer is currently closed-source. This might change in the future. If you are interested in contributing to the project, or adapting the source-code to your needs, feel free to reach out via E-Mail.