Adaptive Meeting Scheduling for Large-Scale Distributed Groupware

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach of collective scheduling among a community of distributed users. This approach, named Distributed Adaptive Scheduling (DAS), deploys flexible, lightweight agents to quickly find and suggest suitable solutions of scheduling for a large number of users. The DAS agents can move from one machine to another to co-ordinate mutually acceptable solutions for a proposed meeting. They also possess behavioural intelligence, by making adaptive decisions about next actions according to current environment and conditions. As a consequence, quick and efficient scheduling can be achieved for users located at different places. Experimental results have proved that DAS is especially suitable for large-scale distributed scheduling, and scheduling with complex calendars. The DAS approach has been successfully integrated with a personal assistant agent platform to provide completely automatic meeting scheduling for both stationary and mobile users.