MEETING ARRANGEMENT SYSTEM

BASED ON MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY

Takao Kawamura, Shinichi Motomura, Kengo Kagemoto and Kazunori Sugahara

Tottori University

4-101, Koyama-Minami, Tottori 680-8552, JAPAN

Keywords:

Meeting arrangement system, groupware, mobile agent.

Abstract:

In this paper, a meeting arrangement system based on mobile agent technology is proposed. The users of

the system do not need to input all of their schedules unlike the existing groupwares. When a user intends

to call a meeting, he only inputs information about the meeting. On behalf of the inviter, mobile agents

move around each invited user’s computer to ask whether he can join the meeting and negotiate with him

if necessary. Therefore, the inviter’s work becomes less compared with using the existing groupwares. We

have developed the system with our mobile agent framework on Java platform and conﬁrmed its effectiveness

through experiments.

1 INTRODUCTION

The necessity of face-to-face meeting has not de-

creased at all, even though interactive media such as

telephone, facsimile, and email have diffused widely.

In general, the following steps are required to orga-

nize a meeting.

1. Specify who should join the meeting and a time-

frame during which the meeting must be held.

2. Send mails or phone all the participants a number

of times to collect their schedules.

3. Merge their schedules and ﬁx the date and time of

the meeting.

4. Select appropriate participants, ask them to open

the schedule, and return to step 3 if there is no date

and time available, otherwise go to step 5.

5. Notify the arranged date and time of the meeting to

all the participants.

Those are time-consuming routine tasks, especially

steps 3 and 4.

Some sort of groupware would assist us to organize

a meeting. The term groupware refers to software ap-

plications, such as Lotus Notes/Domino (IBM, 2005),

Microsoft Exchange Server (Microsoft, 2005), and

Cybozu Share360 (Cybozu, 2005), designed to al-

low a group of users on a network to work simulta-

neously on a project. Groupware may provide ser-

vices for communicating, group document develop-

ment, scheduling, and tracking.

To utilize a groupware to organize a meeting, all

schedule of participants must be managed by the

groupware server, therefore all possible participants

are requested to input their schedules into the server

always. If anyone fails to maintain his schedule on

the server, the scheduling function of a groupware be-

comes useless. In addition, although existing group-

wares have a function to ﬁnd the date and time on

which all participants schedule is open, they don’t

have a function to negotiate with appropriate partic-

ipants to open the schedule. That is to say, the above

most difﬁcult steps 3 and 4 are left to people.

In this paper, a meeting arrangement system based

on mobile agent technology is proposed to reduce

time and effort on meeting scheduling. Although

there are many reports on the agent-based meeting

scheduling, especially algorithms or strategies for ne-

gotiation among multi-agents (Sen and Durfee, 1994;

Jennings and Jackson, 1995; Bui et al., 1996; Gar-

rido and Sycara, 1996; Modi and Veloso, 2004), there

are few on developing an application system which

includes the following features:

1. Nobody is requested to input his all schedule into a

server before any meeting is intended to call.

2. An agent selects appropriate participants and asks

them to open the schedule.

117

Kawamura T., Motomura S., Kagemoto K. and Sugahara K. (2006).

MEETING ARRANGEMENT SYSTEM BASED ON MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY.

In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Internet Technology / Web

Interface and Applications, pages 117-120

DOI: 10.5220/0001250901170120

 SciTePress

This paper is organized in 5 sections. The design

of the proposed system and an implementation of the

system on Java platform are described in Section 2

and 3, respectively. In Section 4, we present the re-

sult of experiments. Finally, in Section 5, we describe

some concluding remarks.

2 MEETING ARRANGEMENT

SYSTEM

In this section the design of the proposed meeting ar-

rangement system will be presented.

When a user of the proposed system intends to call

a meeting, he selects participants from registered on-

line users. In addition, he provides the further infor-

mation about the meeting that consists of a timeframe

during which the meeting must be held, the duration

of the meeting, and the subject of the meeting. Then

an agent is created to arrange the meeting and collect

schedules from both the inviter and invitees. They are

requested to classify each hour in the timeframe into

three categories: “free”, “tentative”, and “busy”. An

agent may ask a user whether he can join a meeting

only when the meeting will be held across his ten-

tative hours. In addition to the three categories, an

inviter of a meeting can select the category named

“preferable” in which he hopes the meeting will be

held.

The negotiation procedure of an agent is as follows:

1. Merge all the participants’ schedules and generate

a list which contains all the possible continuous

hours up to the meeting length. Hours classiﬁed

as busy by one more participants are excluded.

2. Order the list by the number of hours relating a ne-

gotiation, by the number of persons relating a ne-

gotiation, and by the inviter’s preference.

3. Exit from this procedure if no negotiation is

needed, i.e., the number of hours relating a nego-

tiation of the top element of the list is zero.

4. Retrieve each element of the list and negotiate with

the related participants to open their schedules until

a negotiation succeeds or the list is empty.

3 IMPLEMENTATION

An implementation of the proposed system has been

developed on Java platform by using our mobile agent

framework, Maglog(Motomura et al., 2005; Kawa-

mura et al., 2005) .

As shown in Fig. 1, in this implementation, agents

described in the previous section are divided two

types of agents: scheduling agents and query agents.

A scheduling agent corresponding to a meeting cre-

ates query agents for each participant of the meeting.

Each query agent asks one participant’s schedule con-

currently. The scheduling agent does the rest of the

work for meeting scheduling.

In addition to the two types of agents, a user man-

agement agent is introduced to manage user informa-

tion that include login name, password, IP address of

the user’s computer, and online/ofﬂine status. Login

name and password are static while IP address and

online/ofﬂine status are updated dynamically when a

user logins to the system. A user can use any com-

puter on the network because his login name is tied

up with the IP address of his computer dynamically.

Each query agent migrates to the user management

computer to obtain the IP address of a participant’s

computer at the ﬁrst, and then migrates to the partic-

ipant’s computer by using the obtained IP address to

ask his schedule. The IP address of the user manage-

ment computer is assumed as known.

Figure 1: Overview of the meeting arrangement system de-

veloped on Java platform.

As mentioned in the above section, when one in-

tends to call a meeting, he needs to select participants

and to provide the further information about the meet-

ing that consist of a timeframe during which the meet-

ing must be held, the duration of the meeting, and

the subject of the meeting. Figure 2 shows a sam-

ple screen-shot of selecting participants and inputting

information about a meeting. One can select partic-

ipants through dragging a node from the tree in the

Available Participants pane and dropping

it into the Selected Participants pane. If a

dragged and dropped node is leaf then one person cor-

responds to the node is added to the participants list,

otherwise persons correspond to descendant leaves of

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the dropped node are added to the participants list at

once. An :off sufﬁx on a leaf node indicates that

the corresponding person is in the ofﬂine status, so

that he cannot be selected as a participant. When the

OK button is pressed, a scheduling agent and query

agents for each participant are created. Each query

agent migrates to one participant’s computer and asks

his schedule by opening a schedule window as shown

in Fig. 3. Through this window, one can input his

schedule; select a range of hour-cells by holding down

the left mouse button and dragging the mouse over the

cells; right-click on the cells; choose whether he will

be free, tentative,orbusy in the pop-up se-

lection box. Only an inviter of a meeting can choose

the fourth option preferable. Note that a blank

cell means that the user is free on that time therefore

there is no need to select the free option ordinarily.

One should select it only when he intends to overwrite

other options.

Figure 2: Window for selecting participants and inputting

information about a meeting.

4 EXPERIMENTS

This section presents experimental results obtained

from the implementation of the proposed system de-

scribed in the previous section.

The experimental environment consists of two PCs

with Intel Pentium4 3.0GHz processor and 1GB of

RAM. They are connected through 1000Base-T Eth-

ernet and are running on Turbolinux 10 operating sys-

tem whose kernel version is 2.6.0.

Figure 3: User A inputs his schedule.

As an example, we will examine how a schedul-

ing agent negotiates with participants when user A

intends to hold a two hours meeting with user B be-

tween July 5th and July 6th. We assume that user A

and user B inputted their schedules shown in Table 1.

A blank cell in Table 1 means that user A or user B is

free on that time.

Table 1: Schedules of user A and user B between July 5 and

July 6.

July 5 July 6

user A user B user A user B

9 tentative tentative busy

tentative tentative busy

busy

tentative busy

14 busy busy

15 preferable busy busy

16 preferable busy busy

Table 1 shows that some negotiation is needed to

hold a two hours meeting between July 5th and July

6th. Table 2 shows durations to be selected as can-

didates for negotiation in the order of priority. A

scheduling agent negotiates with user A and/or user B

to open the schedule in that order. Note that it avoids

useless negotiation. For example, If one of user A

and user B denies to open the schedule on the third

duration in Table 2, it does not ask the other user for

opening the schedule since the negotiation succeeds

only if both two persons agree to open the schedule.

In addition, if a negotiation on the third duration fails,

it does not intend to negotiate on the fourth duration

MEETING ARRANGEMENT SYSTEM BASED ON MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY

119

in Table 2 since there is no chance that the negotiation

succeeds.

Table 2: Possible durations of the meeting on July 5 sorted

in the order for negotiation.

Duration Number of Number of

related hours related persons

11–13 1 1

12–14

2 1

10–12

2 2

9–11

4 2

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper, a meeting arrangement system based on

mobile agent technology is presented to reduce time

and effort on meeting scheduling. With the proposed

system, all an inviter of a meeting has to do is to spec-

ify who should join the meeting, a timeframe during

which the meeting must be held, the duration of the

meeting, and the subject of the meeting. The rest is

done by agents, i.e., query agents collect all the par-

ticipants schedule, and a scheduling agents searches

the date and time available for the meeting, negoti-

ates with appropriate participants if necessary, and ﬁ-

nally notiﬁes the arranged date and time of the meet-

ing to all the participants. The proposed system sim-

pliﬁes the work not only of an inviter, but also of all

participants. Instead of inputting all schedule into

a server before any meeting is intended to call, one

is requested to input only the schedule between the

timeframe of a meeting.

To make the proposed system more practical, it

is necessary to consider the priorities of participants,

i.e., the key person of a meeting must join it; on the

contrary, a meeting may be opened without persons

with low prior.

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