Meeting Scheduling Application using Availability and Priority Attendance Heuristics

Abstract

Meeting scheduling is a repetitive and time consuming task for many organizations. Emails and electronic calendars has been used to help a meeting host in this process. However, it does not automate the process of searching the optimal time slot. Manual scheduling may result in suboptimal schedule. Therefore, automation is needed for meeting scheduling problem. The purpose of this research is to propose an applied model consisting of both acquiring participants’ existing schedule, and searching for an optimal time slot. Previous studies groups the solution of meeting scheduling into either constraint satisfaction or heuristics approach. Heuristics is more appropriate for a dynamic environment. The heuristics-based model is designed to consider participant availability and participant prioritization. The more participants are available, the better the time is as a candidate for optimum schedule. In the proposed model, the availability of certain key person, experts, or host may carry more weight than normal participant. An Android based application is developed as a prove of concept of the proposed model. Google Calendar API is used in this model to acquire the existing schedule, then each time slot is assigned a score based on availability weighting. The time slot with the highest score is considered the optimal solution. Evaluation is done by simulating the scheduling part for various numbers of meetings and time slots. The result shows that the model is capable of searching the optimal meeting schedule in less than one second for each of the experiment.