On Nonredundant Cost-Constrained Team Formation

Due to the wide application of the task assignment on the internet, team formation problem has become an important research issue. A recently proposed problem ClusterHire aims to find a team of experts to accomplish multiple projects which can harvest a maximum profit under a limited budget. However, there exist redundancies in the team yielded by existing algorithms. This paper first studies the properties of the problem, and give two pruning strategies based on them. Secondly, a redundancy-eliminating strategy and a team-augmenting strategy are proposed. In addition, a new algorithm for generating a profit-maximizing team is also proposed. It is based on the redundancy-eliminating and team-augmenting strategies. The experimental evaluations show that our proposed strategies and algorithms are effective.