I met with my client, Mr Tian, in person and he told me how the task of arranging meetings is usually done. Mr. Tian is an employee at CNPC who is in charge of scheduling meetings for his department. The task was usually done manually on a spreadsheet and “things can get messy by the end of the year when there are a lot of meetings happening.” Mr. Tian usually spends around 3h/week arranging meetings. He had to create a table consisting of meeting names, starting and finishing times, and meeting rooms. If there are two meetings happening at the same time in the same meeting room, he would discuss with the meeting organizer in person or via email and update the meeting time. I also got a chance to talk to one of the employees and she said that this program can hopefully save some time since she had to email Mr. Tian whenever she wanted to book a meeting room. This project aims to create a more convenient way of registering meetings, detecting conflicting meetings, and updating meetings.

Rules of the project:

  1. There are two meeting rooms, one can contain 50 people and the layout of chairs is flexible (chairs may be arranged as either face-to-face or facing the same way), the other can contain 20 people and the layout is fixed.
  2. All meeting times should fall in working hours, i.e. 8:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 17:00 from Sunday to Friday.
  3. Prioritize important meetings (important meetings have fixed times that cannot be changed).