TAIP: an anytime algorithm for allocating student teams to internship programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces TAIP, an anytime heuristic algorithm for efficiently allocating student teams to internship programs, formalizes the problem, proves its computational hardness, and demonstrates TAIP's effectiveness and speed compared to exact methods.

Contribution

The paper formalizes the team allocation problem for internships, proves its computational hardness, and proposes TAIP, a heuristic algorithm that improves allocation efficiency and quality.

Findings

TAIP reaches optimal solutions in many cases.

TAIP outperforms CPLEX in computational time.

The problem is proven to be NP-hard.

Abstract

In scenarios that require teamwork, we usually have at hand a variety of specific tasks, for which we need to form a team in order to carry out each one. Here we target the problem of matching teams with tasks within the context of education, and specifically in the context of forming teams of students and allocating them to internship programs. First we provide a formalization of the Team Allocation for Internship Programs Problem, and show the computational hardness of solving it optimally. Thereafter, we propose TAIP, a heuristic algorithm that generates an initial team allocation which later on attempts to improve in an iterative process. Moreover, we conduct a systematic evaluation to show that TAIP reaches optimality, and outperforms CPLEX in terms of time.