Efficiency and fairness criteria in the assignment of students to projects

Abstract

AbstractTeamwork has increasingly become more popular in educational environments. With the also increasing mobility trends in the educational sector, internationalization and other diversity features have gained importance in the structure of teams. In this paper, we discuss an assignment problem arising in the allocation of students to business projects in a master program in Norway. Among other problem features, the students state their preferences on the projects they most want to conduct. There are also requirements from the companies that propose the projects and from the program administration. We develop a bi-objective approach to consider efficiency and fairness criteria in this assignment problem. We test the model using real data of 2017 and 2018, in joint collaboration with the administrative staff of the program. In light of the good results, our proposed solutions have been implemented in practice in 2019 and 2020. The implementation of these solutions have been beneficial for the administration, the students, and the companies.