Integrating Meeting and Individual Events Scheduling

Abstract

Automated meeting scheduling is the task of reaching an agreement on a time slot to schedule a new meeting, taking into account the participants’ preferences over various aspects of the problem. Such a negotiation is commonly performed in a non-automated manner, that is, the users decide whether they can reschedule existing individual activities and, in some cases, already scheduled meetings in order to accommodate the new meeting request in a particular time slot, by inspecting their schedules. In this work, we take advantage of SelfPlanner, an automated system that employs greedy stochastic optimization algorithms to schedule individual activities under a rich model of preferences and constraints, and we extend that work to accommodate meetings. For each new meeting request, participants decide whether they can accommodate the meeting in a particular time slot by employing SelfPlanner’s underlying algorithms to automatically reschedule existing individual activities. Time slots are prioritized in terms of the number of users that need to reschedule existing activities. An agreement is reached as soon as all agents can schedule the meeting at a particular time slot, without anyone of them experiencing an overall utility loss, that is, taking into account also the utility gain from the meeting. This dynamic multi-agent meeting scheduling approach has been tested on a variety of test problems with very promising results.