Abstract
The challenge of the Team Formation Problem (TFP) is to select an effective team for a given task with minimum communication cost and time. The heuristic as well as the recent evolutionary approaches to team formation focus on optimizing one communication cost, yet do not yield teams in a reasonable amount of time. Our study proposes a novel approach to solve the TFP by considering the topology of the underlying social network. We propose two heuristic algorithms: TPLRandom and TPLClosest, that use the degree distribution of the social network to solve TFP. The proposed approach utilizes the power law followed by the degree distribution as well as the skill distribution of the experts to compose an effective team. This idea optimizes not only more than one communication cost but also time. Extensive experimentation is carried out on the large well-known real-world DBLP dataset and all the subnetworks of DBLP. Empirically it is observed that the proposed algorithm TPLClosest is 3, 10, 27, and 65 times faster than Genetic algorithm, MinSD, Cultural algorithm and MinLD algorithm respectively. Further our algorithms are found to be significantly scalable. The results are shown empirically on different sized networks of DBLP.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
https://dblp.uni-trier.de/xml/.
References
Anagnostopoulos, A., Becchetti, L., Castillo, C., Gionis, A., Leonardi, S.: Power in unity: forming teams in large-scale community systems. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 599–608 (2010)
Anagnostopoulos, A., Becchetti, L., Castillo, C., Gionis, A., Leonardi, S.: Online team formation in social networks. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 839–848 (2012)
Berktaş, N., Yaman, H.: A branch-and-bound algorithm for team formation on social networks. INFORMS J. Comput. 33(3), 1162–1176 (2021)
Bredereck, R., Chen, J., Hüffner, F., Kratsch, S.: Parameterized complexity of team formation in social networks. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 717, 26–36 (2018)
Dean, E.: Project Management Statistics: 45 Stats You Can’t Ignore. Business2Community (2023). https://www.business2community.com/statistics/project-management-statistics-45-stats-you-cant-ignore-02168819
Fathian, M., Saei-Shahi, M., Makui, A.: A new optimization model for reliable team formation problem considering experts’ collaboration network. IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage. 64(4), 586–593 (2017)
Gad, A.F.: Pygad: an intuitive genetic algorithm python library (2021)
Georgara, A., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J., Sierra, C.: Allocating teams to tasks: an anytime heuristic competence-based approach. In: Baumeister, D., Rothe, J. (eds.) Multi-agent Systems, pp. 152–170. Springer, Cham (2022)
Gupta, T.: (25) 30 Best Project Management Statistics \(\vert \) LinkedIn (2024). https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/30-best-project-management-statistics-tirtha-gupta-e6fkf. Accessed 26 June 2024
Kargar, M., An, A.: Discovering top-k teams of experts with/without a leader in social networks. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 985–994 (2011)
Kargar, M., An, A., Zihayat, M.: Efficient bi-objective team formation in social networks. In: Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: European Conference, ECML PKDD 2012, Bristol, 24–28 September 2012. Proceedings, Part II 23, pp. 483–498 (2012)
Kargar, M., Zihayat, M., An, A.: Finding affordable and collaborative teams from a network of experts. In: Proceedings of the 2013 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, pp. 587–595 (2013)
Kashyap, V.: Experts Thoughts on Team Collaboration Strategy That Helped Them Save Projects From Failing. ProofHub (2024). https://www.proofhub.com/articles/team-collaboration-strategy
Lappas, T., Liu, K., Terzi, E.: Finding a team of experts in social networks. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 467–476 (2009)
Majumder, A., Datta, S., Naidu, K.: Capacitated team formation problem on social networks. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1005–1013 (2012)
Muniz, M., Flamand, T.: A column generation approach for the team formation problem. Comput. Oper. Res. 161, 106406 (2024)
Niveditha, M., Swetha, G., Poornima, U., Senthilkumar, R.: A genetic approach for tri-objective optimization in team formation. In: 2016 Eighth International Conference on Advanced Computing (ICoAC), pp. 123–130 (2017)
Rehman, M.Z., et al.: A novel state space reduction algorithm for team formation in social networks. PLoS One 16(12) (2021)
Selvarajah, K., Kobti, Z., Kargar, M.: Cultural algorithms for cluster hires in social networks. Procedia Comput. Sci. 170, 514–521 (2020)
Selvarajah, K., Zadeh, P.M., Kargar, M., Kobti, Z.: Identifying a team of experts in social networks using a cultural algorithm. Procedia Comput. Sci. 151, 477–484 (2019)
Selvarajah, K., Zadeh, P.M., Kobti, Z., Palanichamy, Y., Kargar, M.: A unified framework for effective team formation in social networks. Expert Syst. Appl. 177, 114886 (2021)
Teng, Y.C., Wang, J.Z., Huang, J.L.: Team formation with the communication load constraint in social networks. In: Trends and Applications in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 125–136. Springer, Cham (2014)
Wang, X., Zhao, Z., Ng, W.: A comparative study of team formation in social networks. In: Renz, M., Shahabi, C., Zhou, X., Cheema, M.A. (eds.) DASFAA 2015. LNCS, vol. 9049, pp. 389–404. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18120-2_23
Wi, H., Oh, S., Mun, J., Jung, M.: A team formation model based on knowledge and collaboration. Expert Syst. Appl. 36(5), 9121–9134 (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Addanki, B.R., Bhavani, S.D. (2025). Team Formation Based on the Degree Distribution of the Social Networks. In: Bramas, Q., et al. Distributed Computing and Intelligent Technology. ICDCIT 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15507. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81404-4_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81404-4_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-81403-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-81404-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)