Group-to-group reviewer assignment problem

Abstract

The Reviewer Assignment Problem is a critical management problem faced by academic journals, conferences, and research funding agencies. Previous relevant literature focuses on performing an optimized assignment of manuscripts (or proposals) to reviewers. In this paper, we study a group-to-group reviewer assignment problem, where manuscripts and reviewers are divided into groups, with groups of reviewers are assigned to groups of manuscripts. We formulate this problem as a multi-objective mixed integer programming model, which is proven NP-hard. An effective two-phase stochastic-biased greedy algorithm is then proposed to solve the problem. Results of comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. The approach is applied to a real application, for which the result receive positive and encouraging feedback from users.