Assigning judges to competitions of several rounds using Tabu search

The judge assignment problem consists in finding an assignment satisfying the competition rules (hard constraints) and meeting, as much as possible, the competition organizers objectives (soft constraints). In this paper, various specific real-world constraints found in organizing academic competitions are handled. We tackle the corresponding problem with a metaheuristic approach based on Tabu search. The numerical results indicate that very good solutions can be generated in reasonable computational times.