An evolutionary metaheuristic for forming teams in the classroom with constraints

[EN] Team formation is essential for developing teamwork-related skills in educational settings. The problem of team formation in the classroom consists of partitioning a classroom into non-overlapping teams of students, including every single student. Several algorithms have been proposed to automa...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Candel, Gonzalo, Sanchez-Anguix, Víctor|||0000-0003-4851-0037, Alberola Oltra, Juan Miguel|||0000-0002-5486-5638, Julian, Vicente|||0000-0002-2743-6037, Botti V.|||0000-0002-6507-2756
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/232274
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/232274
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Team formation
Artificial intelligence
Metaheuristics
Evolutionary algorithm
Teamwork
Classroom
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] Team formation is essential for developing teamwork-related skills in educational settings. The problem of team formation in the classroom consists of partitioning a classroom into non-overlapping teams of students, including every single student. Several algorithms have been proposed to automate the formation of teams, each employing different criteria for guiding the team formation process. Traditionally, metaheuristics have been a common approach due to the combinatorial complexity of the problem. This paper introduces a novel and general evolutionary algorithm for team formation in the classroom guided by mutation, the general concept of synergy between team members, and local search. Our algorithm allows for flexible team size constraints and the inclusion of compulsory and forbidden student combinations, which are not considered in existing methods but are important for capturing human relationships in the classroom. In addition, our algorithm is independent of the specific objective function employed to evaluate the teams formed. We present experiments comparing our proposal with other state-of-the-art algorithms, demonstrating robust performance across different objective functions employed in the team formation literature, superior scalability as the problem size increases, and remarkable performance in settings with or without the aforementioned constraints.