SoC-constrained team formation with self-organizing mechanism in social networks

Given a task requiring a set of skills, the team formation problem in social network aims to find a team that covers all the required skills and minimizes the communication cost. However, to make the team work more efficiently, a proper leader is needed for managing and communicating with all the members in the team. As the number of required skills increases and the team grows in size, a single leader is not sufficiently capable of administering a large project since the leader may not have enough time to communicate with all of the team members. Therefore, from the practical perspective, the team would be divided into smaller sub-teams, each of them has a leader. In the field of management, the size constraint of each team is called Span of Control (SoC). In this paper, we tackle the problem of finding teams of experts with SoC constraints in social network. To solve the problem effectively, we propose three basic algorithms, and explore a Self-Organizing mechanism to determine the role of each individual in a team to be the leader or a member. For solving the problem more efficiently, we design a gamma HSCCent node ranking strategy, and the corresponding enhanced algorithms are proposed. Experimental results from both quantitative and qualitative studies show that the teams composed by our proposed algorithms have better performance in both effectiveness and efficiency. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.