RIA: Designing and Implementing a Distributed Meeting Scheduler

由组织中的员工执行的例行、耗时和重复性的信息处理任务可以潜在地自动化。自动化可能带来的好处包括让员工集中精力从事相对多产的工作，并通过消除由于工作的繁琐性质而无意中引入的人为错误来提高工作质量。自动化的一个候选任务是安排个人之间的会议。尽管过去的努力已经产生了必要的技术来构建分布式代理，这些代理可以代表相关用户安排会议，但在实现有用的系统之前，在编码用户目标和约束方面仍有许多工作要做。拟议的研究将产生一个有效实施的系统，在不影响用户偏好和限制的情况下有效地安排会议。这将填补目前可用的日历管理软件的空白。这项研究将包括开发一种语言和推理程序来指定和推理用户偏好，从有限的信息建立代理模型，以及开发协商机制来协调部分合作的代理。本研究的一个独特贡献在于开发了同时适应环境需求和关联用户需求的智能代理。这些技术将是对不断发展的分布式人工智能领域的重大贡献，并可在协同信息系统和计算机支持的协同工作等领域得到有效应用。

Routine, time-consuming, and repetitive information processing tasks performed by employees in organizations can be potentially automated. Possible benefits from automation include relieving employees to concentrate on relatively fruitful and productive jobs, and in improving the quality of work by eliminating human errors that are inadvertently introduced due to the tedious nature of work. A candidate task for automation is that of scheduling meetings between individuals. Though past efforts have produced necessary techniques for building distributed agents that can schedule meetings on behalf of associated users, much work remains to be done in encoding user goals and constraints before a useful system can be implemented. The proposed research will produce an efficient implemented system that effectively schedules meetings without compromising user preferences and constraints. This will fill a void in the currently available calendar management software. This research will involve developing a language and inference procedure to specify and reason about user preferences, building models of agents from limited information, and developing negotiation mechanisms to coordinate partially cooperative agents. A unique contribution of this research lies in developing intelligent agents that are adaptive to the environmental demands and the needs of associated users at the same time. These techniques will be a significant contribution to the evolving field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and can be gainfully applied in fields like Cooperative Information Systems and Computer Supported Cooperative Work.