Grouping tasks and individuals in the scope of project-based work with the equitable partitioning (EP) problem approach

The problem of creating working groups for students or employees is a problem that is frequently studied nowadays. While this grouping phase can be shaped according to the project assignment, course contents and certain characteristics for the students, it can be shaped according to concepts such as specific tasks, job description, expertise of the employee and project work for the employees. This thesis study focuses on assigning individuals and tasks to the relevant teams within the scope of the project for any company that will perform project-based work. Within the scope of the method of which the starting point is the Equitable Partitioning Problem, it is aimed to create the groups as equal or close to each other in terms of certain characteristics in the process of assigning individuals to teams, while it is aimed to create the workload balance and to use the human resource in the best possible way in the process of assigning tasks to teams. Also, while it is aimed to increase the performance of the teams, to create a competitive environment and to increase the areas where individuals can add value to each other by forming the teams as equal or as close as possible, it is aimed to keep employee satisfaction as high as possible by considering the balance of workload and human resources. For this reason, different goal programming models have been proposed considering 3 different goals. The proposed models differ from each other in the way that the goals are formulated in a single or in more than one objective function. The effectiveness and usage areas of these models have been demonstrated by solving sample problems of different sizes. Analysis of the models in terms of running time and solution quality show that, the models with a single objective function are mostly successful for tactical decisions while the models with more than one objective function are successful for operational decisions in general.