Workgroups Diversity Maximization: A Metaheuristic Approach

Workgroup assignment problems commonly appear in various settings including international business schools. Especially if diverse people, like students, need to be divided into workgroups one may seek environments where diversity is fostered by generating heterogeneous workgroups. We study a problem of workgroups diversity maximization, i.e., the problem of building workgroups with the goal of maximizing intra-group diversity, while minimizing inter-group heterogeneity. For solving this problem with different objectives we propose a hybrid metaheuristic approach which combines local search techniques with a population based metaheuristic, including the cross entropy method as well as path relinking as ingredients. Numerical results are presented on some real-world instances.