Grouper: Optimal Assignment Workows for Higher Education

This manuscript presents grouper, a CRAN package for higher-education allocation workflows based on mixed-integer optimization. The package supports three recurring planning tasks: assigning students to groups and topics while promoting diversity, assigning self-formed groups to topic slots based on stated preferences, and allocating multi-role workload under fairness, preference, and priority constraints. The paper emphasizes structured inputs, configurable objective functions, solver-backed model construction, and interpretable outputs that map back to teaching and administrative records. The latest version of the software can be installed directly from R. The package page is https://cran.r-project.org/package=grouper The github repository can be reached at https://github.com/zimmy313/grouper