Optimizing meeting scheduling in collaborative mobile systems through distributed voting

Decision making through distributed voting can help automate routine-like collaborative tasks. In this paper we concentrate on how distributed voting strategies can be used for scheduling meetings in mobile and pervasive environments. Our work focuses on optimizing the meeting scheduling result for each participant in a mobile team by using user-specific preferences and information available on their devices. This negotiation is done in a distributed manner directly between the peers. In this paper we describe different approaches for the decision making strategy involving voting theory to balance out the different user preferences and availabilities. The weight of the votes from each participant can also be adjusted according to their importance or necessity in the given meeting. We also introduce briefly an approach to support distributed decision making strategies pervasively using a lightweight Web-based platform. To conclude the paper, we give our views on the future development directions and evaluation plans as well as extend the approach for other related domains.