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A personal meeting scheduling agent

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Abstract

When setting up a meeting, meeting participants need to reach a mutual agreement to hold the meeting subject to their personal constraints and preferences. It is a time-consuming process, and a variety of calendaring applications are in use assisting users to schedule meetings. Software applications failed to overcome the constraints of the traditional-scheduling process and works as a supporting tool for managing meeting information. One of the main constraints in automated scheduling is the unavailability of a standard structured communication protocol. In addition, automated scheduling requires other issues to be considered such as automated decision-making paradigm, negotiation strategy selection mechanism, etc. This paper proposes a personal meeting scheduling agent (PMSA) and a personal meeting scheduling protocol (PMSP). PMSP is embedded in the PMSA for handling bilateral and multilateral negotiations. PMSA is designed using model-based, goal-based methodology. Additionally, PMSP is designed following a structured negotiation protocol influenced by simultaneous response protocol. To evaluate all meeting invitations and to make decisions subject to users’ preferences, participants’ profiles, and the schedule availability, this paper utilizes the naïve Bayes model of maximum likelihood Estimation. The PMSP goal is to automatically make decisions and select the appropriate negotiation strategies to avoid or resolve possible meeting conflicts. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed PMSP, a simulation environment with experimental results is presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, B4P 2R6, Canada

    Elhadi M. Shakshuki & S. M. Mozammal Hossain

  2. King Faisal University, Al-hassa, 31982, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

    Elhadi M. Shakshuki

Authors
  1. Elhadi M. Shakshuki
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  2. S. M. Mozammal Hossain
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Correspondence to Elhadi M. Shakshuki.

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Shakshuki, E.M., Hossain, S.M.M. A personal meeting scheduling agent. Pers Ubiquit Comput 18, 909–922 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-013-0695-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-013-0695-6

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