Neural Network Preference Learning Approaches For Improving Agent-Based Meeting Scheduling Problems
Meeting scheduling is a distributed, tedious and time-consuming task in an organization which involves several individual in different location. The preferences and calendar availability of each individual are vary and treated as private information that unlikely to share with other individuals....
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2007
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/5218/1/FSKTM_2007_19.pdf |
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| Summary: | Meeting scheduling is a distributed, tedious and time-consuming task in an
organization which involves several individual in different location. The
preferences and calendar availability of each individual are vary and treated as
private information that unlikely to share with other individuals. Application of
software agent is one of the solutions to automate this tedious task. Agent-Based
Meeting Scheduling (ABMS) consists of several autonomous Secretary Agent
(SA) that perform meeting scheduling task on behalf of their respective user
through negotiation among them. Searching strategy is the negotiation technique
that performed by SA in searching a suitable meeting timeslot. This study is
interested in investigating the efficiency of searching strategy in term of
communication cost, optimality of solution found and proposal successful rate
during negotiation. Preliminary study of searching strategy use relaxation process to allow agents negotiate by relaxes their preference when conflicts arise. This
strategy was extended with “preference estimation” technique to optimize the user
preference level of negotiation outcome. However, this will increase the cost of
searching process. As the result, an improvement of relaxation searching strategy
by adapting artificial neural network (ANN) learning mechanism into SA is
proposed in this study. ANN is used in this study because of its popularity in
predicting. Unfortunately, ANN has never been used to improve the searching
strategy in meeting scheduling. The back-propagation neural network (BPNN) is
applied in this research to intelligently predict of participants’ preferences and
guide the host in selecting proposals that are more likely to get accepted by
participants. Hence, increase the accuracy of negotiation outcome and reduce the
communication cost. A computer simulation is conducted to compare the
proposed searching strategy with the two existing strategies namely “relaxation”,
and “relaxation with preference estimation”. It is carried out by performing
scheduling tasks on a set of meeting in difference calendar density. Some
measurement such as, the average preference level for committed meeting,
optimality of the solution, the communication cost, and rate of successful
proposals are defined to evaluate the performance of these three strategies. Finally,
the result of the simulation shows the ability of proposed searching strategy to
find the timeslot that close to optimal solution and achieves higher average
preference level. Besides, proposed searching strategy requires less
communication cost to achieve optimal solution. In conclusion, the use of ANN in
relaxation searching strategy successfully improves the performance of timeslot
searching process in ABMS. In future works, the existing system may be extended to deal with more complex and dynamic scheduling situation such as synchronize
scheduling, meeting rescheduling and user preference elicitation technique. |
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