Scheduling software that solves time constraints

Question

Is there good software or a good toolkit for coordinating schedules and organizing meetings?

The concrete problem I have to solve:

I have a people from group A, and b people from group B. Now schedule individual meetings between people in A and people in B.

This is a real-life problem. There is an open day in a company, which has several interviewers. On that day, a group of prospective employees is visiting. For each prospective employee, we have to schedule different meetings with different interviewers, all of which have different time constraints.

So, it's a constraint satisfaction problem. Is there easy-to-use software, etc? Any ideas?

Update: If we just use a simple calendar it will be a lot of work to schedule all the meetings. It's almost like finding the shortest path in a graph by just inspecting it, instead of running a good algorithm to compute the answer.

Answer 1

Every Groupware-Solution with a Calendar should do this.

Answer 2

You should be able to solve this with Integer Linear Programming.

Excel has a add-on, solver. You create a matrix, define constraints and let the Solver give you the optimal solution using IP.

Take a look here for what kind of problems IP solves.

Answer 3

Prolog, or a derivative language such as ECLiPSe.

Answer 4

Could the Doodle website possibly be of use? (Unfortunate name, I know...)

Answer 5

I would think that the best way to solve your problem is with a constraint programming toolkit. The problem you describe would be pretty easy to model, as there are not that many constraints. As for which constraint toolkit to use, then this can be a bit hit and miss. If you are using Java there are a few free ones, the one I have used is Choco, which has recently undergone a rewrite, it can be slow for some constraints - you end up just having to rethink your model at times. It tends to be the opinion that ILOG have one of the best solvers around - I have not used the latest incarnation of their solver though. Also, ILOG don't put prices on their website, and I know that even for an academic licence it was very expensive. I think ILOG Solver works in all .NET languages and Java as well. A new entry to the market is from Microsoft with their Solver Foundation. I've only just started looking at this but it seems really nice and the licence agreement is reasonably favourable, i.e. you can use it free under certain restrictions.

Answer 6

I would say Fendza could help, but it's employee scheduling instead of meeting scheduling. I'm sure there are some free apps that does meetings pretty well though. That market space has tons of competitors and software companies.

• James F