Team Formation with Time Limit in Social Networks

Team formation is finding a team of experts in a social network to complete a given task. In many tasks, there is a deadline to complete them. Previous research work doesnt consider this point. In this paper, an attribute time is considered in team formation problem. For an expert completing a skill will cost some time. To complete a task, experts should communicate with each other, which will cost some time too. This paper is the first to consider these two elements and define a new cost model TotalCost. Based on the new cost model, we propose two approximation algorithms. The objective is to find a team not only covers the skills that the task requires as well as completes every skill in the specified time and minimize TotalCost. Experimental results show that the team built by our methods satisfies the given task and with a low TotalCost.