An Automated Distributed Meeting Scheduler for FCVW Plug-in
Hsiang-Hwa Koo and Elhadi Shakshuki
Jodrey School of Computer Science
Acadia University
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada B4P 2R6
032139k@acadiau.ca, elhadi.shakshuki@acadiau.ca
Abstract
People have faced conflicts for shifting scheduled meetings
to other time slots in order to fit incoming meetings or to
find a time slot to book a meeting. The goal of this research
is to develop a personal distributed meeting scheduler in
FCVW (Federated Collaborative Virtual Workspace) that
assists users to deal with these situations. FCVW is an
extension of CVW [6] developed by MITRE. In our
approach to meeting scheduling, is to provide each user
with meeting scheduler agent. Each agent is able to manage,
negotiate and schedule tasks, meetings, events,
appointments for its user. This paper describes the objective
of our research to develop an automated distributed meeting
scheduler.
is another alternative to help users’ book and arrange their
meetings and appointments.
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Figure 2. Computer scheduling applications
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1 Introduction
Network
A scheduler is one of the most important personal tools in
daily routines. Since computing technologies have
improved rapidly, software designers have developed many
useful personal applications to fit users’ needs and replace
the traditional tools. Scheduler is one of those significant
developments, and Figure 1 shows the traditional
scheduler, and Figure 2 is an instance of using scheduling
software to book meetings. In the software realm there are
many scheduling applications such as Microsoft Outlook [4]
and Microsoft Exchange Server [5].
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8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
On Mon. Jan. 17,
2005
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8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
On Tue. Jan. 25, 2005
Figure 3. Book meetings through the network
User
Figure 1. Traditional scheduler
These applications can be combined together through a
network. The combination of these programs allows one
user to book meetings on another user’s scheduler. Figure 3
shows an example booking meetings via the network. PDA
Copyright © 2005, American Association for Artificial Intelligence
(www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Although the aforementioned schedulers are useful tools,
they cannot work on behalf of their users automatically and
autonomously. The main goal of our work is to develop an
automated distributed meeting scheduler which consists of
several agents. Each user can have an agent that acts on
behalf of him or her. This agent utilizes the calendar and
allows its user to inputs a meeting request and then it
negotiates with agents corresponding to other users to
schedule the meeting. The agents will communicate with
each other using the email server. Figure 4 shows our view
how a user might book meetings through the network with
the personal assisting agents.
The agent can help the user to manage multiple tasks,
events, and appointments. Utilizing different negotiation
strategies [3] the agent will be able to make its decisions
AAAI-05 Student Abstract / 1610
which are based on the users’ constraints and preferences
that allow it to alter meetings in different time slots. We
will be also considering incorporating a learning technique
to the agent. This makes the agent to monitor the user
behaviour as well as other agents’ behaviours.
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Personal
Agent
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Personal
Agent
Personal
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messages into the machine language and transfer to the
destinations. The client application has abilities to
communicate with server, manage the negotiation with
other agents, book or find the desired time slots, and
display the calendar. The client is a part of FCVW plug-in
in the Eclipse platform. FCVW is an extension of
Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) [6]. CVW
provides the “virtual building” which users can
communicate, collaborate, and share information without
geographic problem. The Eclipse [7] is an open source
platform with an IDE which allows users to edit
programming languages such as JAVA and C/C++. The
Eclipse consists of extensive plug-ins, and users can use the
plug-in development environment to develop their own
plug-ins, and then integrate them into the Eclipse
workbench. The meeting scheduler will be used as a plugin.
4 Conclusion
Figure 4. Book meetings using agents
2 Design Concepts
In this work, we will utilize the approaches presented in
Pragnesh[1] and Sandip Sen [2]. The design of the meeting
schedulers has two main parts, the server and the client.
The components of the client include calendar displayer,
negotiation manager, learning processor, email generator,
and schedule finder. The calendar displayer displays the
visual contact with the user. The negotiation manager
manages tasks or appointments with other users or agents.
The learning processor experiences from real world, and
provides feedbacks to increase decision-making. The email
generator generates the latest notification, and sends it to
attendees. The schedule finder provides available time slots
to the negotiation manager, and arrange meetings
internally. The server consists of three components,
including knowledge base, message formatter, backup
database and communicator. The knowledge base stores all
previous negotiation cases that will be used by the learning
processor. The message formatter responsible for parsing
incoming messages and formatting the outgoing messages
to the required message formats. The backup database
assists users to backup data of their local hard drive, and
update meetings in their scheduler when they are offline.
The communicator builds a link between users, and
transfers messages between users. This forms the basic
architecture of our proposed meeting scheduler system.
Automated distributed meeting schedulers are the next
generation of the scheduling applications. It is used the
personal assisting agent to let schedulers work intelligently.
The learning processor and negotiation strategies are the
two most difficult concepts to materialize. Although
researchers have found some solutions to solve these two
problems, it requires a lot of improvements and study in
order to achieve optimal result, and stability.
References
[1] Pragnesh Jay Modi, Manuela Veloso, Stephen F. Smith,
and Jean Oh, 2004, CMRadar: A Personal Assist Agent for
Calendar Management, At The Agent Oriented
Information Systems.
[2] Sandip Sen, 1997, An automated distributed meeting
scheduler, IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their
Applications, Volume 12 Issue 4.
[3] Roman Berres, and Eugenio Oliveira, 1999 , Automated
Distributed Meeting Scheduler, Faculdade de Engenharia,
Universidade do Porto.
[4] Microsoft Outlook http://office.microsoft.com/enus/FX010857931033.aspx
[5]
Microsoft
Exchange
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/default.mspx
[6]
Collaborative
Virtual
http://cvw.sourceforge.net/
3 Implementation
Currently, we started implementing the proposed meeting
scheduler in FCVW. FCVW consists of Server, client and a
middleware layers. The server program contains abilities to
identify users’ authorization, and to modify users’
Workspace
[7] Eclipse Foundation http://www.eclipse.org/
AAAI-05 Student Abstract / 1611
Server
(CVW)