A fuzzy approach for the reviewer assignment problem

Assignment of experts to project proposals is a significant task for funding agencies which have to assess the potential value of the research and development (R&D) projects through peer review. The problem is known as reviewer assignment problem and has real-world applications in funding agencies, conferences and research journals. Given a set of experts and a set of proposals; the problem can be defined as assigning the most suitable experts to the proposals under some constraints, which are generally encountered by funding agencies. In this study, a fuzzy model is offered to solve the reviewer assignment problem. The objective of the model is to maximize the total matching degree of assigned experts under some constraints such as cost of forming a panel and the size of a panel. The matching degrees are defined using linguistic variables to denote the expertise of each expert with respect to each proposal. The fuzzy mathematical model, which also takes into account different constraints related to the problem, is solved via the selected fuzzy ranking methods namely; the signed distance method and the method of ranking fuzzy numbers with integral value. The solution of an example problem - inspired from a real-life situation with both of the mentioned methods revealed the effectiveness of the solution approach. It is believed that the use of the offered fuzzy approach could improve the accuracy of the decisions made by funding agencies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.