The sociotechnical teams formation problem: a mathematical optimization approach

摘要

Based on the sociometric analysis of social networks, we introduce the sociotechnical teams formation problem (STFP). Given a group of individuals with different skill-sets and a social network that captures the mutual affinity between them, the problem consists in finding a set of pairwise disjoint teams, as harmonious as possible, with a minimum specified number of individuals per team per skill. We prove that STFP is NPdocumentclass[12pt]-hard and propose an integer linear programming formulation. We show several classes of facet-inducing inequalities for the corresponding polytope. Computational experiments performed on a set of 120 test instances attest the efficiency of a solution method based on the formulation strengthened by valid inequalities and on a simulated annealing algorithm used to provide good initial feasible solutions.