Automated Assignment of Proposals to Reviewers

A computer program automates the process of selecting unbiased peer reviewers of research proposals submitted to NASA. Heretofore, such selection has been performed by manual searching of two large databases subject to a set of assignment rules. One database lists proposals and proposers; the other database lists potential reviewers. The manual search takes an average of several weeks per proposal. In contrast, the present software can perform the selection in seconds. The program begins by selecting one entry from each database, then applying the assignment rules to this pair of entries. If and only if all the assignment rules are satisfied, the chosen reviewer is assigned to the chosen proposal. The assignment rules enforced by the program are (1) a maximum allowable number of proposals assigned to a single reviewer; (2) a maximum allowable number of reviewers assigned to a single proposal; (3) if the proposing team includes a member affiliated with an industry, then the reviewer must not be affiliated with any industry; and (4) the reviewer must not be a member of the proposing team or affiliated with the same institution as that of a member of the proposing team.