Minimal Cost Stable Workforce Allocation in Presence of Ties

In this paper, we address the problem of allocating workforce to software projects, considering bilateral (project managers' and employees') preferences and cost of allocation. Earlier research has addressed the workforce allocation to software projects as stable matching problem with strict preferences ranking. However, in practice, there are scenarios where project managers did not strictly rank the employees; therefore, there are ties in the preference list. We developed a stable matching with ties based optimization model to create a minimum cost stable allocation. Our results suggest that a software firm can reduce allocation cost and improve the average preferences for both the workforce and the project managers in the presence of ties in the preference list.