Using temporal abstractions and cancellations for efficiency in automated meeting scheduling

Techniques are presented to improve the time taken by autonomous scheduling agents to schedule meetings and to accommodate as much as possible high priority meetings in an overconstrained situation. The first of these objectives is attained by building a temporal abstraction hierarchy of the calendar and negotiating at successively lower levels of the hierarchy, thereby pruning away unpromising parts of the search space. The second objective is attained by developing an estimated utility measure of scheduling a new meeting by bumping an already scheduled meeting, which has to be subsequently rescheduled (if possible). Within this framework, priorities associated with meetings, and estimates of the work required to reschedule bumped meetings are taken into account