We compared feasible, partially feasible, and infeasible initial populations using a univariate EDA and a tree-based EDA. We also studied the effects of penalty strength and local search, our results showed that initialization had more influence on the search than penalty strength.

Traveling Tournament Problem Figure generated by Daan van den Berg.

The full paper can be seen here

You can also read our earlier work on generating feasible initial schedules for the TTP here.