Automatic review assignments: How does it work?

We want to use the automatic assignment of submissions to reviewers:
Overview => Manage Submissions and Reviews => Automatic Assignment of Reviews
How does the automatic assignment of reviews work, what are the priorities during the assignment process?

(A German version of this article is available.)

The automatic paper assignment process of ConfTool Pro works as follows:

The system tries to find conflicts of interests for all reviewers and marks them as such.
Then the algorithm tries to find the best reviewers for each paper (so not the best papers for each reviewer).

The system does not delete any review assignments, it just adds new assignments.
If you want to delete many assignments automatically, please use the function:
Overview => Submissions & Reviews => Delete Several Review Assignments or Submitted Reviews
Of course you can always refine the automatic assignment manually.

The automatic assignment algorithm considers the bids of potential reviewers first, then their areas of expertise, and finally it looks for reviewers who still have few papers to review.

Specifically the algorithm works as follows to find the best reviewers for all papers:
1. The biddings for "wanted" papers
2. The biddings for "would like" papers
3. The matching topics according to the areas of expertise (counting down
     from the highest number of matches to 1, e.g., 5,4,3,2,1 matches
     between areas of expertise and topics selected by the authors).
4. Finally the system looks who has few reviews assigned so far. Reviewers
    with the lowest number of reviews assigned receive the remaining papers.

Please also have a look at the following information about review assignment in ConfTool:
How to Assign Reviews in ConfTool