Scheduling research grant proposal evaluation meetings and the range colouring problem

Abstract

In many funding agencies a model is adopted whereby a fixed panel of evaluators evaluate the set of applications. This is then followed by a general meeting where each proposal is discussed by those evaluators assigned to it with a view to agreeing on a consensus score for that proposal. It is not uncommon for some evaluators to be unavailable for the entire duration of the meeting; constraints of this nature, and others, complicate the search for a solution and take it outside the realm of the classical graph colouring problem. In this paper we (a) report on a system developed to ensure the smooth running of such meetings and (b) compare two different ILP formulations of a sub-problem at its core, the list-colouring problem. © Springer-verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.