Forming a team of cost-effective and well-collaborated experts in social networks based on hierarchical skill model

Social network-based team formation problem has been widely studied from different aspects. However, the skills in earlier works were treated equally, and cannot be substituted by other related or similar skills. In addition, assigning experts who possess alternative skills for a required skill is not allowed. To better fit real world scenarios, we propose a novel hierarchical skill model to let skills interchangeable. By considering the communication cost and the personnel cost, we develop an optimization framework under the hierarchical skill model to deal with the trade-off between communication and personnel cost. The experiments show that our proposed framework and the hierarchical skill model is reasonable and has better performance than earlier works.