This repository contains the Gurobi-based Java code of the 'Seminar Paper: Optimized Grouping in Educational Activities' (https://doi.org/10.26083/tuprints-00024768) by Lars Steffen März and Thomas Herde from February 26, 2023 at TU Darmstadt published via TUprints under the
LICENSE: CC BY 4.0 International - Creative Commons, Attribution, cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ABSTRACT: Grouping people to foster synergies has been an active field of research for decades, both in social sciences and management science. But also from the viewpoint of mathematical modelling and optimization, it is a challenging task due to its combinatorial and multi-objective nature. This paper focuses on the educational context by specifically considering group and topic assignments rooted in social preferences, topic interests, prior knowledge and other properties to an unprecedented extent. It provides highly customizable MIPs to model and Java code to solve such problems relying on the Gurobi library. Initial numerical tests, utilizing heuristically parameterized and randomly generated artificial user data, show computational tractability and provide approximately Pareto-efficient solutions to the user for moderate instance sizes of up to 30 students and 15 topics. Finally, the goal is to supply the chair for Management Science and Operations Research at TU Darmstadt with the developed software for practical application and evaluation.