Venue optimization one year later: new use cases emerge

During the pandemic, teams at SAS looked at how we could use our advanced analytical solutions to help manage the impact. One solution, developed within weeks of the start of the pandemic, was Venue Optimization:

“SAS?for Venue Optimization enables college athletic programs, professional sports organizations and entertainment venues to quickly run seating and attendance simulations to maximize ticket sales, revenues and attendance while supporting fan safety.” (August 2020, press release)

Why Venue Optimization?

The intention of SAS Venue Optimization was to help sports and other venues to maximize their venue capacity while adhering to safety guidelines, such as maintaining social distance. Effective implementation of it has not always been possible, for two main reasons:

• First, different ‘waves’ of the pandemic led to consecutive lockdowns around the globe. Initial expectation was that life would go back to normal, albeit with constraints, after the first wave and lockdown. However, a second wave soon followed, and venues had to close again.
• Second, guidelines never allowed maximum use of venue capacity, even outside lockdowns. At best, numbers were capped well below capacity.

Venue Optimization still had an impact, just in different ways. The topic and solution created a lot of interest, and led to discussions with sports organizations around the globe. As my colleague Dan Axman clarifies:

“Venue Optimization has offered a solution for venues to maximize their revenue, even with significant attendance restrictions. In a period in which the live event industry came to a grinding halt, we were happy to offer some ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ and could engage in meaningful conversations with many sports and entertainment industry customers around the globe.”

Equally interestingly, although the solution was originally intended for large venues such as sports stadiums and arenas, it also inspired customers to consider alternative applications and use cases.

Maximizing attendance at graduation

One example is a project with the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The university wanted to allow a maximum number of students to attend this year’s graduation ceremony. We therefore worked with the University’s athletic department to prepare their Camp Randall Stadium for its first event since the pandemic started. My colleague Sertalp Cay, has the inside track on this development:

“We received the stadium manifest and social distancing data requirements, based on which we could deliver an optimized seating lay-out. The solution’s flexibility allowed us to optimize the seating layout to match specific requests from the customer, including exact number of seating pods within each seating level. It was great to see the Commencement Day image they sent to us and to see that our solution enabled UW-Madison students to attend their graduation ceremony. Our work really made a difference to them!”

Where next for Venue Optimization?

Looking at the global vaccination rates and the growing optimism, we believe it could go two ways: Judging by practice between lockdowns, we will either see venues capped at a specific number or we will go back to full capacity. These are certainly the two scenarios we have seen at #Euro2020 as well.

Both scenarios will not allow for the current Venue Optimization solution to offer its full value to organizations and venues. However, we’re not sorry, because we all want life to get back to normal as soon as possible! Instead, we’re pleased and proud that we could contribute to COVID response projects and deliver practical solutions (and hope!) to people across the world.

Even if Venue Optimization might have limited use in the near future, sports organizations and federations could achieve plenty of other benefits from Optimization techniques, such as:

• Schedule optimization: As leagues construct their annual match schedules, optimization could help. For example, it could consider distances between venues and CO2 emissions to find the most efficient schedule with least environmental impact.
• Price optimization: Many professional sports organizations may face high demand for seats after the pandemic. Optimization could consider elements like fan sentiment, ticket demand and price elasticity to find optimal pricing schemes for games. This will enable organizations to increase revenue even with ticket numbers capped.
• Athlete optimization: Advanced analytics and optimization techniques can be used by collegiate and professional sports organizations to keep athletes performing at the highest levels, prevent injuries, and maximize training. This could contribute to winning more games, matches, and championships.

Join us

There are certainly enough possibilities (and ideas!) for analytics in general, and optimization in particular, in sport. We’d love to hear your ideas about how data, analytics, optimization and AI will be used around sports in the future. Just leave a comment or send me a message!

For more information about Sports Analytics from SAS, see: www.sas.com/sports.

Project credits

Different people at SAS have been involved in the Venue Optimization project, but I would like to specifically call out following 'core' team members (in alphabetical order): Dan Axman, Bas Belfi, Christer Bodell, Sertalp Cay, Reece Clifford, Jay King, Luca Spinelli.

Previous articles on SAS Venue optimization:

• July, 2020: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/venue-optimization-after-lockdown-update-demo-bas-belfi/
• May, 2020: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/sports-after-lockdown-optimizing-seating-solutions-stadiums-bas-belfi/