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Forming coordinated teams that balance task coverage and expert workload
Department of Computer Science, Boston University, Boston, USA.
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, TCS.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5211-112X
Department of Computer Science, Boston University, Boston, USA.
2025 (English)In: Data mining and knowledge discovery, ISSN 1384-5810, E-ISSN 1573-756X, Vol. 39, no 3, article id 19Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

We study a new formulation of the team-formation problem, where the goal is to form teams to work on a given set of tasks requiring different skills. Deviating from the classic problem setting where one is asking to cover all skills of each given task, we aim to cover as many skills as possible while also trying to minimize the maximum workload among the experts. We do this by combining penalization terms for the coverage and load constraints into one objective. We call the corresponding assignment problem Balanced-Coverage, and show that it is NP-hard. We also consider a variant of this problem, where the experts are organized into a graph, which encodes how well they work together. Utilizing such a coordination graph, we aim to find teams to assign to tasks such that each team’s radius does not exceed a given threshold. We refer to this problem as Network-Balanced-Coverage. We develop a generic template algorithm for approximating both problems in polynomial time, and we show that our template algorithm for Balanced-Coverage has provable guarantees. We describe a set of computational speedups that we can apply to our algorithms and make them scale for reasonably large datasets. From the practical point of view, we demonstrate how to efficiently tune the two parts of the objective and tailor their importance to a particular application. Our experiments with a variety of real-world datasets demonstrate the utility of our problem formulation as well as the efficiency of our algorithms in practice.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature , 2025. Vol. 39, no 3, article id 19
Keywords [en]
Data mining algorithms, Greedy, Social network, Submodular optimization, Team formation
National Category
Computer Sciences Computer graphics and computer vision
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-361452DOI: 10.1007/s10618-025-01090-xISI: 001439607800001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-86000301651OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-361452DiVA, id: diva2:1945882
Note

QC 20250319

Available from: 2025-03-19 Created: 2025-03-19 Last updated: 2025-03-19Bibliographically approved

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Gionis, Aristides

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