Event scheduling with soft constraints and on-demand re-optimization

With the increased use of today's information technologies, more people are using electronic calendaring systems, such as Outlook, to schedule everyday events. This includes work related items such as meetings as well as personal items such as birthdays and their kids' events. There have been no significant changes to this process. People enter their personal event items on their calendars. If someone needs to schedule a meeting, they will view available time slots of all potential attendees and choose an appropriate date and time. There are two weaknesses in this process that we address. Firstly, the value of an event to a person is not specified and hence when scheduling a meeting, one simply assumes that any slot that is marked busy is unavailable for the meeting. However, a busy slot could be for something that is not as important as the meeting to be scheduled. The second weakness is that once a meeting is scheduled, the chosen time slots are not changed unless the organizer decides to do so for some specific reason. However, the optimal time slot for the meeting may change over time. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses these issues and illustrate its value through simulations.