Collaborative team formation using brain drain optimization: a practical and effective solution

In the area of professional social networks, collaborative team formation with its NP-hard nature, has attracted the attention of many researchers. The purpose of this study is to find a collaborative team which covers required skills and minimizes the communication cost among team members. To solve this problem, BRADO (BRAin Drain Optimization), a recently-proposed meta-heuristic swarm-based algorithm which simulates the brain drain phenomenon, has been utilized. In order to evaluate BRADO, it has been applied in extensive experiments to the DBLP and IMDb datasets. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the BRADO algorithm in comparison with PSO, GA, ICA, RarestFirst and EnhancedSteiner algorithms. Our findings lead us to believe that the BRADO algorithm can be a promising method in the context of team formation problem.