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Parameterized Complexity of Team Formation in Social Networks

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9778))

Abstract

Given a task that requires some skills and a social network of individuals with different skills, the Team Formation problem asks to find a team of individuals that together can perform the task, while minimizing communication costs. Since the problem is NP-hard, we identify the source of intractability by analyzing its parameterized complexity with respect to parameters such as the total number of skills k, the team size l, the communication cost budget b, and the maximum vertex degree \(\varDelta \). We show that the computational complexity strongly depends on the communication cost measure: when using the weight of a minimum spanning tree of the subgraph formed by the selected team, we obtain fixed-parameter tractability for example with respect to the parameter k. In contrast, when using the diameter as measure, the problem is intractable with respect to any single parameter; however, combining \(\varDelta \) with either b or l yields fixed-parameter tractability.

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Acknowledgement

This work was started at the research retreat of the TU Berlin Algorithms and Computational Complexity group held in April 2014.

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Correspondence to Robert Bredereck .

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Bredereck, R., Chen, J., Hüffner, F., Kratsch, S. (2016). Parameterized Complexity of Team Formation in Social Networks. In: Dondi, R., Fertin, G., Mauri, G. (eds) Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management. AAIM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9778. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41168-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41168-2_12

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41167-5

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