Design of an agent-based, multi-user scheduling implementation

The meeting scheduling domain in a large, geographically distributed corporation is characterised by scenarios where position in the corporate hierarchy and frequent rescheduling and cancellation of meetings plays a large role in determining the outcome of the scheduling task. We highlight these important issues, and describe in detail both a mathematical model and scheduling implementation designed to address the distributed meeting scheduling problem in this domain. The design of the implementation deals with the need for privacy, scalability, user control, reasonable meeting times, and trust. The implementation itself is written using conventional DAI tools, such as KQML and CLIPS. A small-scale qualitative survey was performed which indicated alignment of the design with the needs and expectations of users.