Negotiation strategies for meeting scheduling conflict management

This study is concerned with personnel availability in meeting as a factor that can influence a meeting´s value. Since a meeting schedule is not guaranteed to be fixed until the due date, this study proposes an approach to handling meeting scheduling conflict automatically ahead of the meeting. It specifically aims to maintain a meeting schedule through meeting negotiation strategies in such a way that the failure to fulfill the meeting quorum can be decreased; in other words, rescheduling phase can be avoided. A meeting schedule in this study is a timeslot selected by calculating the social welfare of personnel availability using the Clarke Tax Mechanism. There are two cases which are presented here as the basis for the negotiation process: the negotiation strategy for personnel with zero tax and the negotiation strategy for personnel who are taxed by some costs. The strategies which include personnel replacement and quorum threshold relaxation are embedded into personnel tax criteria. By using these meeting scheduling negotiation strategies, personnel availability can be maintained in order to satisfy the meeting constraint of personnel minimum attendance.