National Football League Selects Optimal Planning Solutions to Develop Scheduling Software

Optimal Planning Solutions, Inc. (OPS) announced today that it has signed a multi-year agreement with the National Football League to assist in the creation of the league’s regular season schedule. The agreement stems from the two companies’ successful collaboration on the 2004 schedule. OPS customized their leading-edge sports-scheduling tools, which use Dash Optimization’s Xpress-MP solver, to mathematically model and solve the NFL’s extremely complex scheduling problem.

The OPS Scheduling System enabled the NFL to search and analyze countless potential schedules for those that best balanced the needs of the teams and network partners, taking into account the many constraints that must be considered for venue availability, network requirements, home/away spacing, etc.

"The process of developing the regular season schedule was, until recently, mostly a manual process, and an intensely complex one. The complexity is due to numerous factors that must be met to satisfy our teams' and broadcast partners’ needs and complicated by the logistics of scheduling around stadium availabilities. The ultimate goal always is to provide our fans, network partners and teams with outstanding schedules," said Glenn Adamo, NFL Vice President of Media Operations, responsible for overseeing the League's scheduling process. "We chose Optimal Planning Solutions because they were able to best solve all of our complex issues as they relate to schedule-making. The company not only understood our unique requirements but also created a tool that greatly improves the timeliness of our scheduling process as well as the quality of the schedules."

"Scheduling the 2004 NFL season was an extremely difficult task. We are very excited to be working with the NFL, and helping them to optimize their scheduling process", said Rick Stone, President of Optimal Planning Solutions. "We look forward to a long and successful partnership."

Alkis Vazacopoulos, Director at Dash Optimization adds "Optimal Planning Solutions has done a great job of creating a world class scheduling model for the NFL and we are very happy that Xpress-MP will be used to optimize that model."

About Optimal Planning Solutions

Optimal Planning Solutions, a privately held company based in Vernon, British Columbia, is the leading provider of scheduling services to professional sports leagues. Their optimization-based scheduling tools and techniques allow professional sports leagues to maximize preferred venue dates, accommodate television-network partners, and minimize travel costs while adhering to a myriad of league-specific scheduling constraints. They currently serve more than a dozen professional sports leagues, including the National Football League (NFL), Canadian Football League (CFL), Major League Soccer (MLS), National Rugby League (NRL - Australia), and the Arena Football League (AFL).

To contact Optimal Planning Solutions, please visit the company Web Site at www.optimalplanning.com, or call (250) 545-8256.

About Dash Optimization

Dash develops and markets Xpress-MP, the world's leading software product for modeling and optimization. Xpress-MP solves large-scale optimization problems and enables better business decisions and resulting financial benefits in areas such as supply chain management, operations, logistics and asset management. It has been applied in sectors as diverse as manufacturing, processing, distribution, retailing, transport, finance and investment.

Dash has offices in the UK and US with distribution partners in Europe, the Far East and Japan.