Bi-Objective Team Formation in Social Networks

Complexity of scientific issues and specialization of research fields, make team-working inevitable. Setting a good leader as team manager and selecting qualified staff as team members, are keys to the success of a team project. The problem of team formation with a leader in social networks is defined as finding the best team and the most appropriate leader, aiming to effectively collaborate towards a common goal and communication and personnel costs little. Despite the extensive research that has been done in the field of team formation in social networks, the challenge of finding a team of experts satisfying the capabilities required to do the project and leading to cost minimization, is unwavering. On the other hand, due to the increasing popularity and users of social networks, time-consuming algorithms are of other challenges in this field. Therefore having a project, the target is to find a team of experts, such that the team satisfies the required capabilities to complete the project, having a minimum communication and personnel cost. In this research, an algorithm based on the bi-objective optimization is proposed to identify such a team. To minimize both factors, a new compound cost function is defined based on linear combination of objectives. To evaluate the Bi-Objective TF, experiments are done using the DBLP real data. The results show better speed and efficiency comparing similar algorithms, due to removing superfluous nodes based on the experts’ capabilities and project features.