Forming Grouped Teams with Efficient Collaboration in Social Networks

摘要

Not only the expertise of people but also the collaboration among people are of great importance for a team. Given a set of experts with different skills, a social network that reflects the collaboration among people and a task, the team formation problem in social networks aims at forming a team to complete the task. The team is required to satisfy the skill requirements of the task and collaborates efficiently. Different communication cost functions have been proposed to have a good measure on the collaboration strength of a team in the existing work. However, the grouped organization structure inside team is never considered, which is very common in real life scenarios. In a grouped team, we are more concerned with the collaboration among people in same group and among leaders. In this paper, a novel communication cost function for a grouped team is proposed, and we define the Grouped Team Formation problem. To solve the problem, an exact algorithm is proposed. We further modify the exact algorithm to propose two heuristic algorithms with higher efficiency. Extensive experiments evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods, and validate the reasonability of our problem definition in practical settings.