Sandip Sen
Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences
University of Tulsa
600 South College Avenue
Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
Phone: (918) 631-2985
Fax: (918) 631-3077
E-mail: sandip@kolkata.mcs.utulsa.edu
URL: http://euler.mcs.utulsa.edu/~sandip/
"RIA: Designing and Implementing a Distributed Meeting Scheduler"
The PI received an NSF Research Initiation Award in 1994 from the ITO
subdivision of the IRIS program of the CISE Directorate. The PI
believes that routine, time-consuming, and repetitive information
processing tasks performed by employees in organizations can be
potentially automated. Possible benefits from automation include
relieving employees to concentrate on relatively fruitful and
productive jobs, and in improving the quality of work by eliminating
human errors that are inadvertently introduced due to the tedious
nature of work. In this proposal, the PI proposed to investigate such
a candidate task for automation: that of scheduling meetings between
individuals. The goal of the proposal was to develop the mechanisms
required to effectively schedules meetings without compromising user
preferences and constraints. The research priority of the PI was to
develop general distributed negotiation mechanisms between automated
agents that can trade-off conflicting interests.
Results From Research
Using User Preferences:
One of the major scientific components of this research has involved
the development of a structure, formal mechanism for representing and
using user preferences for automating the negotiation for scheduling
meetings. This aspect of our scheduler clearly differentiates our
proposed system from other commercially available products.
User preferences for meeting topics, proposed meeting length, host of
the meeting, invitees to the meeting, etc. are used to assign a
priority for an alternative for a meeting. For example, user A may be
obligated to attend meetings hosted by user B, but not if B was only
an invitee. Each user assigns a value between 0 and 1 for each option
of each dimension. The user also specifies a minimum threshold for
that dimension. If the value of the option falls below the minimum
criteria, then for that dimension the user would prefer not meeting
over meeting. The user is also responsible for rating each dimension
against each other, e.g., who is hosting the meeting may be more
important than whether the meeting is being held in the morning or in
the afternoon.
We assign votes to each preference dimension in proportion to their
weight against each other. Each meeting proposal can then be voted on
by the preferences as to whether the user wishes to meet given the
meeting criteria. For each option above the dimension's threshold,
yes votes in proportion to the weight of that dimension are recorded,
and for each option below the dimension's threshold, no votes in
proportion to the weight of that dimension are recorded. We adapt the
Black's voting rule which guarantees both Pareto and Condorcet winner
criterion. Our adaptation is unique because it allows easy use and
comprehensibility on the part of the user, without sacrificing the
formal properties guaranteed by the underlying bidding mechanisms.
Our approach is a comprehensive one that can be used to develop other
personal information processing agents that can share some of the
routine information processing tasks performed by users in
organizations. The system will provide some default preferences which
each user can modify according to his/her liking. We also anticipate
a learning mechanism to modify these preferences, which will be
particularly useful for naive users who do not modify the preferences
from their default values.
System Implementation:
In designing the architecture of the implemented distributed meeting
scheduler, we had to concentrate on designing a system that would be
readily extensible to accommodate functionalities that may be added to
the system at a later date. The single major design decision we
adopted was to use the e-mail system as the communicating paradigm
between different meeting scheduling agents. Following the same
design philosophy, we chose to use the calendar management system
supplied by most operating systems to store and retrieve the calendar
information of the associated user. Each of the modules in the
architecture can be briefly described as follows:
- User interface: The interface allows users to input meeting requests
and schedule preferences, to check the status of meetings negotiated by the
agent, and to monitor its calendar.
- User preferences: This component stores the preferences of the user
for the nature of schedules, priorities for different types of meetings,
preferences for attending meetings with other users, etc.
- Working memory: The working memory contains the data structures and
memory traces of negotiations on meetings that are currently being
scheduled.
- Negotiation module: This is the ``brain'' of the meeting schedule
system, and uses the user preferences while exchanging proposals with other
scheduling agents to schedule meetings in the working memory.
- Calendar manipulator: This module allows the user interface and the
negotiation module to access and modify the status of the user's schedule
through the calendar management program.
- Message constructor/decoder: This component serves as the interface
with the e-mail system through which messages are communicated with other
scheduling agents. When a proposal is to be sent, this module constructs
an appropriate mail message in the designated format and invokes the
mailer. Similarly, when a proposal or a bid arrives from another agent,
this module decodes the message and posts the proposal or bid into the
working memory.
Publications Resulting Directly From This NSF Award:
- T. Haynes, S. Sen, N. Arora, \& R. Nadella, ``An automated meeting
scheduling system that utilizes user preferences,'' in
Proc. of the First International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
(Agents '97) held in Marina del Rey, CA between February 5-8,
1997.
- S. Sen, ``An automated distributed meeting scheduler,'' accepted for
publication in IEEE Expert.
- S. Sen and E.H. Durfee, ``A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting
Scheduling,'' accepted for publication in Group Decision and
Negotiation Support Systems.
- S. Sen and E.H. Durfee, ``A Contracting Model for Flexible Distributed
Scheduling,'' Annals of Operations Research, volume 65, pages
195-222, 1996.
- S. Sen and E.H. Durfee, ``Unsupervised Surrogate Agents and Search Bias
Change in Flexible Distributed Scheduling,'' in Proc. of the
First International Conference on Multiagent Systems (pages 336-343), San
Francisco, California, June, 1995.
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