Mixed-Initiative Management of Online Calendars

Calendar management has been recognized as a complex, highly personal type of activity, which must take individual preferences and constraints into account in the formulation of satisfactory schedules. Current calendar management services are affected by two limitations: most of them lack any reasoning capabilities and thus cannot help the user in the management of tight schedules, which make the allocation of new tasks particularly challenging. Others are too impositive because they proactively schedule events without involving the user in the decision process. In order to address such issues, we propose a mixed-initiative approach which enables the user to select the events to be considered, receive safe schedule suggestions from the system and select the preferred ones for revising a calendar. A peculiarity of our system is the fact that, in the suggestion of alternative schedules for an event, it searches for solutions which are very similar to the user's current schedule, with the aim of limiting changes to her/his daily plans as much as possible. Our calendar management service is based on the exploitation of well-known Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problems techniques, which guarantee the generation of safe scheduling solutions.