Business matchmaking is a service dedicated to providing one-on-one appointments for small businesses (or sellers) to meet with government agencies and large corporations (or buyers) for contracting opportunities. Business matchmaking scheduling seeks to maximize the total number of appointments with the maximum objective that weighs the preferences of both buyers and sellers. In this paper, the authors transformed the business matchmaking scheduling problem into a 3-dimensional planar assignment problem and solved it heuristically using a series of bipartite maximum weighted maximum cardinality matching problems. Simulation experiments and real data showed that this algorithm outperforms human experts and prior algorithm in terms of number of appointments, the objective that weighs buyer and seller’s preferences, and the execution time.
