Analyzing Travel Patterns for Scheduling in a Dynamic Environment

摘要

Scheduling a meeting is a difficult task for people who have overbooked calendars and many constraints. This activity becomes further complex when the meeting is to be scheduled between parties who are situated in geographically distant locations of a city and have varying traveling patterns. We extend the work of previous authors in this domain by incorporating some real life constraints (varying travel patterns, flexible meeting point and considering road network distance). We also generalize the problem by considering variable number of users. The previous work does not consider these dimensions. The search space for optimal meeting point is reduced by considering convex hull of the set of users locations. It can be further pruned by considering other factors, e.g., direction of movement of users. Experiments are performed on a real-world dataset and show that our method is effective in stated conditions.