Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Abstract

Meeting scheduling takes place when a group of people intend to meet with each other. Since each person has individual availability constraints and preferences, meeting scheduling is naturally distributed and there is a need to schedule the meeting in such a way as to consider the preferences of the set of meeting participants. In addition, individual meeting constraints and preferences may change both as a result of an agent’s situation or as a result of other agents’ scheduling decisions. Therefore, there is a need for distributed reactive schedule revision in response to changing requirements and constraints. We present an approach to distributed meeting scheduling based on modeling and communication of constraints and preferences among the agents. When a feasible global schedule cannot be found, agents enter a negotiation and relax their constraints. The approach enables the agents to find and reach agreement on the schedule with the highest joint utility and to reactively revise the schedule in response to new information.