Schedule-Based Group Assignment Using Constraint Programming

Group work is an important aspect of the educational process in many disciplines, especially business. The literature suggests there are pedagogical advantages to instructor-assigned teams. In this paper, we present a constraint programming approach to assigning students to groups based on their availability. We compare solutions created using several objectives and find that no single objective dominates for all performance measures. Using the model produces group assignments of higher quality and much more quickly than those produced manually.