Mechanism design for multi-agent meeting scheduling
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
Meeting Scheduling Assembles Children in the Rectangular Forest
WI-IAT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02
Eliciting User Preferences in Multi-Agent Meeting Scheduling Problem
International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies
Agent-Based System Design for Service Process Scheduling: Challenges, Approaches and Opportunities
Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science
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In this paper we examine the benefits and limitations of mechanism design as it applies to multi-agent meeting scheduling. We look at the problem of scheduling multiple meetings between various groups of agents that arise over time. Each of the agents has private information regarding their time preferences for meetings. Our aim is to extract this information and assign the meetings to times in a way that maximises social welfare. We discuss problems with previous attempts to design incentive compatible (IC) and individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the task. We focus on the problem of determining when agents are available. In particular, we show that when agents with general valuation functions are asked to supply their availability for meeting times, there is no IC and IR mechanism. Given this impossibility result, we show how the likelihood of violating IR can be reduced through agents expressing their value for the presence of others at meetings. We also show how requesting agent preferences for entire schedules helps to eliminate IC problems.