  For many sports, the allocation of officials to matches is performed manually
and is a very time consuming procedure. For the Scottish Football Association
(SFA), the allocation of referees and other officials to matches is governed by
a number of rules specifying the expertise required from the different types of
official at each level, e.g. Scottish Premiership League referee must be a
grade 1 with high experience. The allocation requires an SFA secretary to
expend several hours to find suitable officials, contact them and assign them.
Most of the time, the secretary is a volunteer who performs the allocation as a
hobby and it would be useful to reduce his costs and time.
  The project aims to reduce the burden on SFA, and potentially other
secretaries, by developing a program to assign SFA officials. A suitable
algorithm must be devised to search through the set of data about matches and
officials and find a potential allocation. The program then updates the
database with the new data, and provides a web interface for both secretaries
and officials.
  A prototype system using the new greedy algorithm has been implemented and
evaluated with SFA secretaries. A final usable referee allocation system has
been designed that uses the greedy algorithm, and is extended after evaluation
of the prototype. The final allocation system based provides both a command
line and a web interface and has also been evaluated by SFA secretaries. In
their letters of recommendation in Appendix F the SFA secretaries indicate that
the final allocation system it will be used again in the future.
