Implementation of an automated event scheduling system

Abstract

Automation is becoming more frequent in many of our daily tasks. Scheduling meetings in an appropriate candidate for automation because of the tedium and difficulties it presents when coordinating with other people. The aim of this study is to design and implement a scheduler that is capable of finding a suitable time slot for all the invitees based on constraints set by the proposer with minimal human interaction. Since scheduling is, in general, an NP-Complete problem, and therefore heuristics are used to reduce the amount of time and resources it normally takes to schedule a meeting. The scheduling process involves checking if the invitees are all available in the indicated time slot, and attempts to reschedule the meeting if not. Indications of invitees on when they do not wish to meet are also considered by the scheduler when checking for availability. All data pertaining to a meeting is stored in a database which is in turn a basis for the scheduling algorithms to make decisions during the scheduling process. The two algorithms implemented in this project are Round Robin and Priority Round Robin. The latter is used only when a meeting of importance needs to be scheduled. The user interacts with the system using a web application, which allows the user to create new meeting, view details of scheduled meetings and accept or reject invitations. Users are also able to schedule a meeting on one of two third party applications, i.e. Google Calendar and Doodle, using their respective API. The insights gained and results from this artefact development include: negotiation between invitees is key to the success of a scheduler allocation; the use of two scheduling methods to allow the scheduler flexibility in its search for a solution is very effective; having a priority levels for meeting and invitees offers a more fair allocation of meeting slots.