Giving assignments based on ranked preferences

[melink14]

I need to make a program that takes in a list of people and their ranked preferences and places them in groups so that most people have their top choices, with a couple of restrictions.

I was trying to find discussion of this problem through google, but I guess my search words are incorrect.

I could probably hack something together to do this but I want to try to do a decent job.

If someone can direct me to other good articles and discussions that'd be fine.

If not, if you have any tips on the best approach that would be great.

Thanks.

[WingedPanther]

I've seen some discussions of this time of problem on math forums. It's an optimization problem, where you are trying to create a "best" score for the assignment.

[melink14]

Looks like this is an application of I guess the classic assignment problem.

For future reference, the hungarian or munkres algorithm deals with this sort of thing.

And also possibly bin packing, but I'm not quite sure on that one yet.