Operations Seminar

This research addresses the problem of dividing a group of people into a collection of teams that need to be “balanced” across a variety of different attributes. This type of problem arises, for example, in an academic setting where it is necessary to partition students into a number of balanced study teams. Recent proposed solutions use linear and nonlinear integer programming.  This talk describes a linear approximation to the nonlinear objective function that significantly reduces the number of integer variables and constraints. Computational experiments are performed on random instances of the problem which lead to a way to determine the quality of the optimal solution obtained by the heuristics. The approach developed here almost always obtains better balanced teams than those from prior methods.

Contact Information:
Pamela White
Department Assistant
pamela.white@case.edu