Solving the Synergistic Team Composition Problem

Co-operative learning is used to refer to learning procedures for heterogeneous teams in which individual and teamwork are organised to complete academic tasks. Key factors for team performance are competences, personality and team members' genders. Here, we present a computational model to form heterogeneous teams that incorporates those key factors. In addition, we propose efficient algorithms to partition a classroom into teams of even size and homogeneous performance. The first algorithm is based on an ILP formulation. For small problem instances this approach is appropriate. However, this is not the case for large problems, for which we propose a heuristic algorithm. We study the computational properties of both algorithms in the context of student teams.