Assigning panels to meeting rooms at the national science foundation

The National Science Foundation provides funding for scientific research throughout the United States. Its program directors solicit requests for funding through calls for proposals and then assemble panels of experts to review these requests. The program directors are responsible for reserving meeting rooms for each of the panels. Our work automates much of the room reservation process by constructing and solving an optimization model that determines how panels should be assigned to available rooms to maximize the utilization of available meeting rooms. The model accommodates multiday panels, differences between the rooms (e.g., capacity, projector support), and double-booking constraints for both rooms and panel organizers. Staff members at the National Science Foundation are currently using this software, and have employed it to successfully schedule engineering directorate panels for the 2014-2015 review year.