Automation of the Capstone Team Formulation Process

The team formulation process is one of the most time-consuming activities for senior design capstone course instructors.Some of the factors contributing to the complexity of the process include balancing students' project interests, interest in working with specific students, personalities, and instructor/institutional project priority.Instructors have used various techniques and subsequent combinations to guide the capstone team formation process: student self-selection, instructor selection based on student leadership style, academic performance, and student "mingling" based on their project preference.Several attempts to automate the team formation process based on combinations of the aforementioned techniques have also been employed.Our capstone teams are multidisciplinary, with 52% industry-based projects; and the remaining 48% being either competition, entrepreneurial, or research-based projects, and require the placement of 200+ students across four sections of mechanical engineering capstone courses, with each section having an average 14 teams, with 3 to 5 students per team.The team formation process has typically taken four faculty, 80 hours (collectively) to manually construct the teams based on the prioritized criteria: institutional project priority, student preference (rating of their top 10 projects), discipline requirements, student's self-identified personality (leadership) profile to account for a balanced team, and student's self-identified skillset.We present two algorithmic approaches to automate the capstone team formation process based on our prioritized criteria.The Fall 2023 team formation process using the algorithmic approach took 10 hours (collectively) with an average student project preference rating of 2.5.Approximately 47% of students were placed on their top project, while 77% were placed on their top-3 project.