Hello!
I am using Alteryx to set up a mentor allocation program in my university. My task is to assign 'mentors' from the senior batch to the incoming batch of new students. So far, I have been able to create an 'affinity matrix' which shows how suited each junior is to each senior, with lower affinity indicating a closer match. I was using Excel's OpenSolver to optimize this entire dataset as per constraints, but am having issues accessing that now and want to replicate the output on Alteryx.
Snapshot of dataset:
Name | Max Mentees | J1 | J2 | J3 |
S1 | 4 | 125 | 250 | 280 |
S2 | 3 | 125 | 250 | 290 |
S3 | 5 | 160 | 215 | 255 |
S4 | 2 | 290 | 190 | 165 |
S5 | 3 | 330 | 230 | 285 |
S6 | 5 | 215 | 255 | 305 |
S7 | 4 | 235 | 160 | 210 |
S8 | 2 | 285 | 200 | 160 |
(This indicates that Senior 8 has an affinity of 285 with Junior 1, 200 with Junior 2 and 160 with Junior 3, hence is best matches with Junior 3 here.)
The constraints are :
1. The maximum mentees assigned to a senior student are indicated in the Max Mentors column.
2. Each junior student must be assigned exactly 2 mentors.
I tried going through earlier questions in the community and using the Optimization tool in Alteryx, but haven't been able to set it up correctly. My goal is to get an output indicating which juniors should be assigned to which seniors to minimize the total affinity.
Thanks and Regards,
R
HI @R_s_j I think you might be looking for the optimization tool which can likely help solve this type of problem. This tool mastery article shows examples of how to utilize this function!
Hope this helps
Best,
Peter