Meeting Scheduling based on Swarm Intelligence

Abstract

The meeting scheduling problem is complicated and time-consuming. In fact, finding the right combination to satisfy all attendees’ availabilities, preferences and privacy seems to be arduous. Besides, some meetings need specific equipment (Telepresence video- conferencing). The objective of our research is to propose a new approach that organizes weekly meetings in a company. The main contributions of this work are i) a novel valued constraint satisfaction optimization formalization (VCSOP) of Meeting Scheduling (MS) problem and ii) a new MS solver based on Particle Swarm Meta-heuristic (MSSI for Meeting Scheduling approach based on Swarm Intelligence). This approach is intended to maximize both users’ preferences and meetings importance while exploiting available resources properly. Meeting Scheduling based on Swarm Intelligence (MSSI) is an initiative to adapt swarm intelligence to MS problems. The experimental comparative evaluation shows that the MSSI approach is scalable and overcomes existing ones in terms of number of planned meetings for over constrained problems.