Mathematical Models for a Social Partitioning Problem

In this paper we develop modeling techniques for a social partitioning problem. Different social interaction regulations are imposed during pandemics to prevent the spread of diseases. We suggest partitioning a set of company employees as an effective way to curb the spread, and use integer programming techniques to model it. The goal of the model is to maximize the number of direct interactions between employees who are essential for company’s work subject to the constraint that all employees should be partitioned into components of no more than a certain size implied by the regulations. Then we further develop the basic model to take into account different restrictions and provisions. We also give heuristics for solving the problem. Our computational results include sensitivity analysis on some of the models and analysis of the heuristic performance.