Allocating Teams to Tasks: An Anytime Heuristic Competence-Based Approach

Athina Georgara, Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, Carles Sierra

Abstract: Many practical applications often need to form a team of agents to solve a task since no agent alone has the full set of required competencies to complete the task on time. Here we address the problem of distributing individuals in non-overlapping teams, each team in charge of a specific task. We provide the formalisation of the problem, we encode it as a linear program and show how hard it is to solve it. Given this, we propose an anytime heuristic algorithm that yields feasible team allocations that are good enough solutions. Finally, we report the results of an experimental evaluation over the concrete problem of matching teams of students to internship programs in companies.