Structured Neighborhood Tabu Search for Assigning Judges to Competitions

A metaheuristic approach including three different stages is introduced to assign the judges for the John Molson International Case Competition. The complexity of the mathematical formulation accounting for the rules to be followed in assigning the judges, leads us to use such an approach. The two different tabu search methods in the first two stages are combined with a diversification strategy. Numerical results are provided to indicate the efficiency of the approach to generate very good solutions.