Collaborative group assignment with competency trees

In collaborative commerce, task groups are often formed from experts of several companies to perform collaborative projects. The proper position assignments to different staff members from multi-organizations have become an important task for the success of projects. This paper proposes a collaborative framework with two components for companies to assign professionals to different roles in forming a group to complete a task. The first component is further divided into 2 parts. The first part uses a tree competency model to define competencies of staff (agents) as well as role requirements. The second part contains a tree similarity algorithm and bonus point algorithm to support the role assignment. The adoption of clustering techniques and negotiation protocol between team requester and multi-agent providers are the second component to support the group role assignments. Preliminary experiments have been performed with some interesting results.