New Paper Finds Optimal Scheduling for Expert QA Forums—And It's Surprisingly Collaborative

A new paper from Rohit Negi and Mustafa Yilmaz, titled "Optimal Scheduling in a Question-Answering Forum of Knowledge Workers," tackles the challenge of efficiently matching questions to experts in a paid Q&A platform. The authors model the system as a queuing network where requests arrive in different topics, and experts have varying proficiency levels. They derive the theoretical capacity of such a system—the maximum request rate that can be sustained without instability—and propose schedulers that achieve this capacity. The paper spans 14 pages and includes 4 figures, with a focus on both individual assignment and collaborative answering strategies.

The key finding is that allowing experts to collaborate on answers can significantly increase overall system capacity beyond what individual assignments alone can achieve. This has practical implications for designing platforms like expert networks, corporate help desks, or even AI-augmented Q&A services. The work is submitted to arXiv under subject cs.AI and cs.SI, and provides a rigorous mathematical foundation for future implementation. As volunteer-based forums evolve into paid knowledge-worker models, this scheduling framework could help platforms optimize throughput while maintaining quality and stability.