The conference paper-reviewer assignment problem

Conference organizers often face the following problem: Given a collection of submitted papers, select a subset to be presented at the conference. The bulk of the work often amounts to assembling a pool of reviewers and then sending each submitted paper to several reviewers. We present in this paper a technique for finding a good assignment of papers to reviewers. An important feature of the solution we find is that each paper is sent to at least one reviewer who is ‘as expert as possible’ for that paper. A major component of the problem is modeled as a bottleneck version of a capacitated transshipment problem.