On the design of an adaptive meeting scheduler

We present design considerations for an automated meeting scheduling agent that processes meeting requests on behalf of its associated user. In our formulation of the meeting scheduling problem, distributed meeting scheduling agents, one per user, intelligently exchange information with each other to schedule meetings without compromising user-specified constraints. In this paper, we first enumerate various strategies we have investigated to focus distributed negotiation between scheduling agents. Next, we demonstrate the necessity for such a scheduler to be adaptive in its choice of options for the various strategy dimensions, so that it can perform effectively over time. In order to build an adaptive scheduler that can effectively choose from available strategy options, we develop quantitative performance estimates of these options using detailed probabilistic analysis. Results from these analyses are used to provide guidelines to choose the most appropriate strategy combination given current environmental conditions and local problem-solving states.<>