Applying AI, recommendation or machine learning techniques to search feature

Question

I'm new to the area of AI, machine learning, recommendation engines and data mining however would like to find a way to get into the area.

I'm working on an conference room booking application which will recommend meeting rooms to employees at which it calculates to be the most suitable time and location. The recommendations are based on criteria which an employee will enter before submitting a search. The criteria can include meeting attendees (which can be in different locations and timezones), room capacity (based on attendees) and types of equipment required.

The recommendation engine will take into consideration timezones and locations and recommend one or more meetings rooms , depending on whether employees are in different builings/geo-graphical regions.

Can anyone recommend recommendation engine, machine learning or AI techniques which i could apply to solving the solution? I'm new to this area so all suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This looks more like an optimization problem. You have some hard constraints and some preferences. Look at Linear Programming. Also google Constraint based Scheduling, there are several tutorials.

Just a warning: This is in general an NP-hard problem, so unless you are trying to solve it for a small number participants, you will need to use some heuristics and approximations. If you want to go a little bit overboard, there is a coursera class on optimization running right now.