A smart meeting room scheduling and management system with utilization control and ad-hoc support based on real-time occupancy detection

In most meeting room scheduling or management system, the availability of meeting rooms are mainly based on pre-determined schedules. However, since the meeting duration is not always exact as it is scheduled, there are some situations that a meeting room is underutilized. Therefore, in this paper, we present a smart meeting room scheduling and management system which detect occupancy status of meeting rooms in realtime and integrate this information into the scheduling application to support ad-hoc meetings and increase room utilization. Our system is a simple, ease-of-implementation solution based on PIR sensor fusion devices and Ethernet connectivity. Occupancy data is sent to a central application server by UDP over IP protocols. On this server, a web application is developed and hosted to not only allow people book rooms for their meetings, but also check the utilization of these rooms based on predefined policies. The system also supports adhoc meetings by providing real-time availability of meeting rooms to users.