Energy-aware meeting scheduling algorithms for smart buildings

The increasing worldwide concern over the energy consumption of commercial buildings calls for new approaches that analyze scheduled occupant activities and proactively take steps to curb building energy use. As one step in this direction, we propose to automate the scheduling of meetings in a way that uses available meeting rooms in an energy efficient manner, while adhering to time conflicts and capacity constraints. We devise a number of scheduling algorithms, ranging from greedy to heuristic approaches, and demonstrate up to a 70% reduction in energy use, with the best algorithms producing schedules whose energy use matches that of a brute force oracle. © 2012 ACM.