Conference paper assignment using a combined greedy/evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents a method that combines a greedy and an evolutionary algorithm to assign papers submitted to a conference to reviewers. The evolutionary algorithm tries to maximize match between the referee expertise and the paper topics, with the constraints that no referee should get more papers than a preset maximum and no paper should get less reviewers than an established minimum, taking into account also incompatibilities and conflicts of interest. A previous version of the method presented on this paper was tested in another conference obtaining not only a good match, but also a high satisfaction of referees with the papers they have been assigned; the current version has been also applied on that conference data, and to the conference where this paper has been submitted; results were obtained in a short time, and yielded a good match between reviewers and papers assigned to them, better than a greedy algorithm. The paper finishes with some conclusions and reflections on how the whole submission and refereeing process should be conducted. © Springer-Verlag 2004.