Title
Constrained group balancing: Why does it work
Abstract
We consider a problem where a set of objects possessing multiple attributes must be partitioned into a certain number of groups so that the groups are as balanced as possible with respect to the number of objects possessing each attribute. This multi-criteria decision problem arises in a variety of practical applications, ranging from assigning students to study groups to designing level schedules for JIT assembly lines. A direct approach, enforcing balance through hard constraints, may lead to infeasibility, but works well in practice. We analyze this phenomenon from the worst-case and empirical perspectives, as well as through an in-depth analysis of one representative practical application – the design of student groups at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The goals of the analysis are to understand what classes of balancing problems may contain infeasible instances and how prevalent such instances are within these classes, as well as to synthesize practical managerial insights that a decision maker could follow in order to increase the chances that balanced groups can be found.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1016/j.ejor.2010.02.011
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Decision support,Combinatorial optimization,OR applications – education,Group balancing
Integer,Decision problem,Mathematical optimization,Decision support system,Operations research,Combinatorial optimization,Multicriteria analysis,Schedule,Phenomenon,Mathematics,Decision maker
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
206
1
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.49
5
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dmitry Krass148382.08
Anton Ovchinnikov2303.87