Seminar: “An Alternative Formulation and an Optimization Based Heuristic for the Reviewer Assignment Problem”
Prof. Dr. Emre Alper Yıldırım
Industrial Engineering, Koç University
Dec 1, Friday 13:40
EA-409
Abstract
Peer review systems are based on evaluating a scholarly work, referred to as a proposal, by experts in that field. In such a system, we consider the reviewer assignment problem, i.e., the problem of assigning proposals to reviewers under the assumption that each reviewer returns her preferences using ordinal rankings. Motivated by the problem defined in Cook et al. (Management Science, 51:655–661, 2005), we focus on reviewer assignments so as to maximize the total number of pairs of proposals to be evaluated while ensuring a balanced coverage of distinct pairs of proposals. We propose an alternative mixed integer linear programming formulation for the reviewer assignment problem. In contrast to the optimization model proposed by Cook et al. (2005), the size of our formulation is polynomial in the input size. Furthermore, our formulation can be utilized to obtain an optimization based heuristic approach, in which an optimal solution of the linear programming relaxation is rounded in a straightforward fashion, followed by a local improvement scheme based on pairwise exchanges of proposals. Our computational results illustrate the effectiveness of our optimization model and our heuristic approach.
Brief bio of the speaker
E. Alper Yildirim is a Professor of Industrial Engineering at Koc University. He earned his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University in 1997 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research at Cornell University in 2000 and 2001, respectively. Prior to joining Koc University, he worked as a faculty member at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and at Bilkent University. His research interests are in the theory and applications of optimization and algorithm design and analysis. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journals Optimization Letters and Optimization Methods and Software.