Algorithm to find meeting time slots where all participants are available

Question

Came across this question in an interview blog. Given free-time schedule in the form (a - b) i.e., from 'a' to 'b' of n people, print all time intervals where all n participants are available. It's like a calendar application suggesting possible meeting timinings.

Example:

Person1: (4 - 16), (18 - 25)
Person2: (2 - 14), (17 - 24)
Person3: (6 -  8), (12 - 20)
Person4: (10 - 22)

Time interval when all are available: (12 - 14), (18 - 20).

Please share any known optimal algorithm to solve this problem.

I am thinking of the following solution.

• Create a currentList of intervals that contain one interval from each person. Initially currentList = [4-16, 2-14, 6-8, 10-22].

• Look for the max_start and min_end in currentList and output (max_start, min_end) if max_start < min_end; Update all intervals in currentList to have start value as min_end. Remove the interval that has min_end from currentList and add the next entry in that person's list to currentList.

• If max_start >= min_end in previous step, update all intervals in currentList to have start value as max_start. If for any interval i, end > start, replace that interval in currentList with the next interval of the corresponding person.

Based on the above idea, it will run as below for the given example:

currentList = [4-16, 2-14, 6-8, 10-22]   max_start=10 >= min_end=8

update start values to be 10 and replace 6-8 with next entry 12-20.

currentList = [10-16, 10-14, 12-20, 10-22] max_start=12 <= min_end=14

add max_start-min_end to output and update start values to 14. Output=[12-14]

currentList = [14-16, 17-24, 14-20, 14-22] max_start=17 >= min_end=16

update start values to be 17 and replace 14-16 with 18-25

currentList = [18-25, 17-24, 17-20, 17-22] max_start=18 <= min_end=20

add max_start-min_end to output and update start values to 20. Output=[12-14, 18-20]

currentList = [20-25, 2-24, - , 2-22]

Terminate now since there are no more entry from person 3.

I have not implemented the above though. I am thinking of a min-heap and max-heap to get the min and max at any point. But I am concerned about updating the start values because updating the heap may become expensive.

Answer 1

A starting point, still to optimize a bit, might be the following (code is in Python). You have the following data (the allPeople list will be clearly created dynamically):

person_1 = ["4-16","18-24"]
person_2 = ["2-14","17-24"]
person_3 = ["6-8","12-20"]
person_4 = ["10-22"]
allPeople = [person_1, person_2, person_3, person_4]

What you might do is to create a list containing all the time slots of the day (i.e. ["0-1", "1-2", "2-3", etc.] as follows:

allTimeSlots = []
for j in range(0,24):
    allTimeSlots.append(str(j) + "-" + str(j+1))

and then create a list called commonFreeSlots, which is made of all the time slots that are inside each person's free time slot collection:

commonFreeSlots = []
for j in range(0,len(allTimeSlots)):
    timeSlotOk = True
    for k in range(0,len(allPeople)):
        person_free_slots = parseSlot(allPeople[k])
        if allTimeSlots[j] not in person_free_slots:
            timeSlotOk = False
            break
    if timeSlotOk:
        commonFreeSlots.append(allTimeSlots[j])

Please note that the function parseSlot is just taking a list of strings (like "2-14","15-16") and returning a list of hourly time slots (like ["2-3","3-4","4-5" etc.] in order to make it comparable with the hourly time slot list allTimeSlots created above:

def parseSlot(list_of_slots):
    result = []
    for j in range(0,len(list_of_slots)):
        start_time = int(list_of_slots[j].split("-")[0])
        end_time = int(list_of_slots[j].split("-")[1])
        k = 0
        while (start_time + k) < end_time:
            result.append(str(start_time+k) + "-" + str(start_time+k+1))
            k += 1
    return result

If I run the above script, I get the following result:

['12-13', '13-14', '18-19', '19-20']

Of course you will have to still work a bit the output in order to aggregate the hours (and having ['12-14','18-20'] instead of the hourly version), but this should be easier I think.

The above solution should work always, however I'm not sure it's optimal, it probably exists a better one. But since you didn't share any attempt yet, I guess you'd just like some tips to get started so I hope this one helps a bit.