Abstract

The Virtual Secretary is a software agent that can act on behalf of its user's secretary. This dissertation presents an introduction to automating a secretarial task, that is, meeting scheduling. Meeting scheduling is a part of the Virtual Secretary's task that negotiates on its user's behalf to arrange a meeting at a suitable time for all attendees according to their priorities and preferences. In this sense, Virtual Secretary produces a compromise solution, which is a tradeoff between conflicting attendees' priorities and preferences. The attendees only have knowledge of their own calendar and preferences, which could be changed or fixed over time. The host of the meeting asks for a meeting, but Virtual Secretary is the central agent that monitors the negotiation. The assumption is that Virtual Secretary locates attendees by e-mail addresses to send them the meeting invitations. The attendees and the host of the meeting interact with the system through the Internet. The users receive their invitations about the pending meeting via e-mails and request their meeting, confirm their attendance in the meeting, cancel their meeting, get the status of their meeting, and prioritize their attendees on-line through the Internet. Virtual Secretary processes scheduling of the meetings off-line on the host machine.