Forming competitively balanced teams

This article examines the problem of assigning individuals to teams to make the teams as similar as possible to each other across multiple attributes. This may be complicated by a variety of constraints, including restrictions on whether specific individuals can or should be assigned to the same team. The problem arises in multiple contexts, including youth recreation leagues and academic programs or courses with mandated project groups. A model for the problem is proposed and various solution approaches are investigated, including mixed-integer programming and several heuristics. Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher’s online edition of IIE Transactions for datasets, additional tables, detailed proofs, etc.