Teambroker: Constraint based brokerage of virtual teams

Abstract

Some consulting projects are carried out in virtual teams, which are networks of people sharing a common purpose and working across organizational and temporal boundaries by using information technologies. Multiple investigations covering these teams focus on coordination, group communication and computer supported collaborative work. However, additional perspectives like the formation of teams are also important. Here one should deal with the question: how to form the best team? To approach this question, we have defined team formation as the process of finding the right expert for a given task and allocating the set of experts that best fulfills team requirements. This has been further transformed into a problem of constraint based optimal resource allocation. Our environment for computer supported team formation has been developed by having adopted the brokerage view that consists of mediating experts between peers requesting a team and the ones willing to participate in a team. Computer supported brokerage of experts has been realized as a distributed problem solving that involves entities representing experts, brokers and team initiators.