Towards Real Time Team Optimization

Teams can be often viewed as a dynamic system where the team configuration evolves over time (e.g., new members join the team; existing members leave the team; the skills of the members improve over time). Consequently, the performance of the team might be changing due to such team dynamics. A natural question is how to plan the (re-)staffing actions (e.g., recruiting a new team member) at each time step so as to maximize the expected cumulative performance of the team. In this paper, we address the problem of real-time team optimization by intelligently selecting the best candidates towards increasing the similarity between the current team and the high-performance teams according to the team configuration at each time-step. The key idea is to formulate it as a Markov Decision process (MDP) problem and leverage recent advances in reinforcement learning to optimize the team dynamically. The proposed method bears two main advantages, including (1) dynamics, being able to model the dynamics of the team to optimize the initial team towards the direction of a high-performance team via performance feedback; (2) efficacy, being able to handle the large state/action space via deep reinforcement learning based value estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through extensive empirical evaluations.