A FORMAL STUDY OF DISTRIBUTED MEETING SCHEDULING

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, r equires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or he r privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making effic ient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting schedulin g is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meet ings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the proces s tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed sched ulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we hav e intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling perform ance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and the scheduling process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, sc heduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires can cellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our on going work in this direction.