Coast Guard Academy First Class Cadets Dana Rohde, Daria McKenna, Vicky Talens, and John Groen pose for a photo before giving their capstone presentation.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Lauren Laughlin
Each summer the Coast Guard Academy Cadet Training (CT) branch assigns 3/c cadets, or sophomores, to operational Coast Guard units across the country to complete an 11-week summer training program. Finding an optimal solution that avoids any justified envy involves all cadets providing a complete ordinal preference list. The CT branch could then assign each cadet to their highest ranked assignment that is available. By defining a summer training assignment by its characteristics, the number of assignments to be ranked can be reduced by using K-modes clustering and a farthest distance initialization heuristic. A complete ordinal preference list with ties can be obtained by cadets ranking these clusters.