The Student-Project Allocation Problem

Abstract. We study the Student-Project Allocation problem (SPA), a generalisation of the classical Hospitals / Residents problem (HR). An instance of SPA involves a set of students, projects and lecturers. Each project is offered by a unique lecturer, and both projects and lecturers have capacity constraints. Students have preferences over projects, whilst lecturers have preferences over students. We present an optimal linear-time algorithm for allocating students to projects, subject to these prefer-ences and capacities. In particular, the algorithm finds a stable matching of students to projects. Here, the concept of stability generalises the sta-bility definition in the HR context. The stable matching produced by our algorithm is simultaneously best-possible for all students. The SPA problem model that we consider is very general and has applications to a range of different contexts besides student-project allocation.