This is a standing problem that is often "solved" badly. Existing products are able to record simple scheduling decisions and share databases, but they fall far short of being able to handle personal preferences.
This problem has, obviously, had paper and pencil solutions as long as there have been paper and pencil, and there were undoubtedly other solutions to it before that. In the computer arena, there are individual calculator size machines to take the place of a calendar notebook (e.g. ...? there are a ton of these), as well as many scheduling programs on multi-user systems which are able to take over some of the time-selection and consistency checking task.
<<Describe current products and their shortcomingsxc8
The problem has been used to focus discussion of requirements and specification. Axel van Lamsweerde provided the results of those discussions as an extended problem statement [vanLamsweerde92, vanLamsweerde93].
Updated Halloween 95 by
Mary Shaw
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