BACKGROUND

In the current employment environment, emphasis is being placed on flexible and a "hoteling" type of workspace where employees sign up for workspaces as needed, as opposed to having permanent designated workspaces. Such an arrangement has many benefits as it scales office space, reduces real estate costs, and creates work areas that foster employees' inclusiveness, collaboration and innovation. However, such a system often has employees, that are working together, seated in distant locations. As such, there is a lot of moving around and lingering before meetings, which causes noise, distraction and discomfort among other employees.

SUMMARY

The exemplary embodiments relate to a method and system for determining a workspace for an employee based on a plurality of parameters and transmitting an indication of the workspace to the employee.

According to an aspect of the present disclosure, the system may store a plurality of parameters, on a database, for the employee. The parameters may include a total number of sessions the employee has scheduled for a current day and a session location for each of the sessions, the location being one of a plurality of session locations. The system may further have a login system configured to receive input from the employee indicating the employee has arrived at an office location. Additionally, the system may further have a processor in communication with the login system.

According to a further aspect of the present disclosure, the login system, upon receiving the input from the employee, triggers the processor to perform operations. The operations may include retrieving the parameters from the database, determining a workspace for the employee based on the plurality of parameters when the workspace is one of a plurality of workspaces, and transmitting an indication of the workspace to the employee. The plurality of parameters may further include a time for each of the sessions. According to a further aspect of the present disclosure, the login system may be a card reader, a RFID reader, a smartphone reader, an application scanner, a quick response code scanner, a fingerprint scanner, a rental scanner, or a keypad device.

According to a further aspect of the present disclosure, the processor may determine the workspace by determining a number of sessions the employee has scheduled for each of the plurality of session locations. Alternatively, the processor may determine the workspace by determining a distance from each of the workspaces to each of the session locations at which the employee has a scheduled session for the current day. The distance may be a Euclidean distance or a graphical distance.

According to a further aspect of the present disclosure, the processor may determine the workspace by inputting the parameters into:

wherein;

i = the employee

j = the workspace

k = a location of the workspace

C = number of the plurality of session locations

Xij = a variable indicating allocating the employee (i) the workspace (j) yik = a number of sessions in the session location

k for the employee

= a distance of the session location (k) to

the workspace (j)

subject to: Xij e{0,l }

i,j = l,...,N

k e 1,...,C.

Alternatively, according to an even further aspect of the present disclosure, the processor may determine the workspace by inputting the parameters into:

wherein;

subject to:

allow the employee to accept or reject the workspace. In an example, when the employee accepts the workspace, the processor may remove the workspace from further determination for other employees. In an alternative example, when the employee rejects the workspace, the processor may determine a new workspace for the employee based on the plurality of parameters and the rejected workspace may be removed from the determination.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Fig. 1 shows a schematic drawing of a system according to an exemplary embodiment.

Fig. 2 shows a parameters table used by a reservation system, according to exemplary embodiments.

Fig. 3 shows a flow diagram of a method for recommending a workspace to an employee, according to exemplary embodiments.

Fig. 4 shows a representative grid of an office layout in the office building, according to exemplary embodiments.

Fig. 5 shows tables that display results of exemplary calculations performed for the determining the workspace for the employee process, according to exemplary embodiments. D TAIL D DESCRIPTION

The exemplary embodiments may be further understood with reference to the following description and the appended drawings, wherein like elements are referred to with the same reference numerals. The exemplary embodiments relate to systems and methods for recommending a workspace to an employee. The employee may be any person employed by a company or given access to the workspace. The workspace may refer to a cubicle, a particular seat, a table, a location, a computer, etc., located in an office building(s). It should be noted that, throughout the disclosure, the workspace may be used interchangeably with a workspace location.

Office buildings have been adopting a concept of flexible workspace where the employees do not have designated workspaces but, rather, have to find an unoccupied workspace when they arrive for work. The flexible workspace is becoming increasingly popular as networks and cloud computing allows employees to work from any terminal which has access to the networks and the cloud computing. This also allows for the amount of employees to exceed the amount of workspaces, especially with bigger companies, since only a certain average percentage of employees come into the office building at a particular time. For example, a company may have part time staff that only comes in a few days a week, a few hours at a time, etc. For instance, an employee A may come in only on Mondays and Wednesdays while an employee B may come in only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Alternatively, employee A may come in from 8 A.M. until 4 P.M. while employee B may come in from 4 P.M. until 12 A.M. As such, providing a permanent workspace to these employees would be wasteful since their schedules allow for both of them to share a single workspace.

The unoccupied workspaces generally get filled on a first come, first serve basis. With the advent of email and smartphones, scheduling multiple and frequent meetings is also becoming more common in many workplace settings. As such, under the current concept of the flexible workspace, the employees are often seated in locations that may not be ideal for the events in their daily schedule. For example, if the employee has a meeting scheduled in a conference room located in one corner of the office, while his workspace for that workday is located on the opposite corner of the office, this would cause undue travel time and commotion when the employee has to travel to and from the meeting.

Further, it is also not uncommon for the employee to have multiple meetings in the same conference room, multiple meetings spaced over different conference rooms located within the same office building, multiple meetings spaced over different conference rooms located within multiple office buildings, or any other combination thereof. The exemplary embodiments discussed below provide a solution to this time consuming and inconvenient problem. Thus, the exemplary embodiments address a problem that is rooted in computer technology. Specifically, the issue of frequent and sudden meetings coupled with flexible workspaces did not exist prior to the rise of email/smartphones and networks/cloud computing. The exemplary embodiments solve the problem of the employees working in inconvenient workspace locations by utilizing a real-time tracking of employee schedules and determining an optimal workspace for each employee based on those schedules.

As shown in Fig. 1, a system 100, according to an exemplary embodiment of the present disclosure, is used to perform the exemplary functionalities that were described above. The system 100 comprises a processor 102, a user interface 104, a display 106, and a memory 108. Each of the components of the system 100 may include various hardware implementations. For example, the processor 102 may be a hardware component that comprises circuitry necessary to interpret and execute electrical signals fed into the system 100. Examples of processors 102 include central processing units (CPUs), control units, microprocessors, etc. The circuitry may be implemented as an integrated circuit, an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), etc., that may or may not execute firmware.

The user interface 104 may be, for example, a keyboard, a mouse, a keypad, a touchscreen, etc. The display 106 may be a liquid crystal display (LCD) device, a light emitting diode (LED) display, an organic LED (OLED) display, a plasma display panel (PDP), etc. Those skilled in the art will understand that the functionalities of the user interface 104 and display 106 may be implemented in a single hardware component. For example, a touchscreen device may be used to implement both the display 106 and the user interface 104. In an exemplary embodiment, the single hardware component may be a login system.

In an exemplary embodiment, the login system may be located on the premises of the office building. For example, when the employee arrives on campus, the lobby may require the employee to utilize the login system before proceeding to the office space. In a further example, the login system may be adjacent to a locked door, wherein the employee may be required to login before proceeding. In an even further example, the login system may be an application on the employee's smartphone or tablet. The application may be referred to as a "login app" throughout the remaining description. When the employee logs in, the login system may display the workspace location for that particular employee. Signing in may involve the employee swiping their employee identification/login card into the login system, tapping an Khl card to the login system, tapping their smartphone to the login system, entering a code into the login system (e.g. through a keypad), scanning a fingerprint or a rental scan, scanning a quick response ("QR") code, utilizing the login app on their smartphone, etc.

Once signed in, the login system may display a recommended workspace for the employee. This would be preferable for exemplary embodiments where the login system is a device located at the office building, such as the swiping or tapping system discussed above. In an alternate exemplary embodiment, the login system may transmit the

recommended workspace to the employee. This would be preferable for login systems where the employee logs in through a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer. For example, if the employee logs in by utilizing the login app on their smartphone, the recommended workspace may be transmitted, from the processor 102 or a server, to the login app, to the employee's email account, texted to the employee, or via any other method of transmission. It should be noted that a person skilled in the art would be capable of combining any of the methods described above. For example, the employee may log in by swiping their identification/login card into the login system and the login system may transmit the recommended workspace to the employee via a text message to the employee's phone.

While exemplary embodiments may refer to the workspace as the recommended workspace location, it should be noted that the workspace location may be mandatory or assigned. This may be an internal decision by the company. In an exemplary embodiment, if the workspace location is recommended instead or assigned, the employee may have an option of declining the workspace location and requesting a different workspace location. Those skilled in the art would understand that such a feature can implemented by an accept/reject function. For example, the employee may sign in on the login system and, upon the workspace location being recommended, the login system may offer an accept button and a reject button. This will be discussed in more detail below.

The memory 108 may be any type of semiconductor memory, including volatile and non- volatile memory. Examples of non- volatile memory include flash memory, read only memory (ROM), programmable ROM (PROM), erasable PROM (EPROM) and electrically erasable PROM (EEPROM). Examples of volatile memory include dynamic random- access memory (DRAM), and fast CPU cache memory, which is typically static random- access memory (SRAM).

The memory 108 includes a database 120. The database 120 may store records correlating to each of the employees as well as to a reservation system for the conference room(s). The reservation system may be, for example, in calendar format and may use a plurality of parameters. For example, for a session in the conference room, the reservation system may store a name of an organizer of the session, names of other employees scheduled to participate in the session, names of guests scheduled to participate in the session, a start and an end time of the session, a duration of the session, an identification of the conference room, etc. A session may be a meeting, a conference, an interview, an appointment, a forum, a seminar or any other congregation of participates. It should be noted that, throughout the disclosure, the term sessions may be used interchangeably with the term scheduled sessions.

Fig. 2 shows an example of a table 200 that may be used by reservation system to organize the plurality of parameters. In this example, the table lists the start time 210 and the end time 220 of each session, the name of the organizer 230 of each session, the names of the other employees 240 scheduled to participate in the session (e.g., attendees) and the location 250 of each session. Here, the location 250 of each session is indicated by a room number (e.g., Room Number A, B, etc.) These parameters may be imported from or exported by a personal information manager. In an exemplary embodiment, the personal information manager may be a commercially available application, such as Microsoft Outlook, Google's G-mail Platform, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mail (OS X), etc. In another exemplary embodiment, the personal information manager may be a local platform developed and utilized by the company. It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that any number of parameters or any variation of this table may be used.

Returning to Fig. 1 the processor 102 may be implemented with engines, including, for example, a recommendation engine 111 and a dissemination engine 112. Each of these engines will be described in greater detail below. Those skilled in the art will understand that the engines 111 and 112 may be implemented by the processor 102 as, for example, lines of code that are executed by the processor 102, as firmware executed by the processor 102, as a function of the processor 102 being an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), etc.

The recommendation engine 111 processes information stored on the database 120 to recommend the workspace to the employee. For example, the recommendation engine 111 may access the database 120 and retrieve the parameters from the reservation system relating to the sessions scheduled for a workday. The parameters may include a location of the session (e.g., a conference room number), the start and the end time of each of the sessions, the duration of each of the sessions, and the participants of each of the sessions. The recommendation engine 111 may then process the retrieved parameters to select a workspace tor the employee to minimize total travel time between the employee's workspace and the conference rooms of the employee's scheduled sessions. The processing will be described in greater detail below.

In an exemplary embodiment, the recommendation engine 111 may filter out employees who are not scheduled to be in the office building or who have indicated that they will be out of the office building for the workday. This may be due to planned vacation time, a sick day, an out of town work affair, or the like. This would reduce the processing necessary to recommend the workspace to the employee.

The dissemination engine 112 transmits the recommended workspace location from the recommendation engine 111 to the display 106. The dissemination engine 112 may transmit the recommended workspace location to the display 106 through an email, a telephone line, the login system, a server, any type of network connection, etc.

Fig. 3 shows a method 300 for recommending the workspace to the employee. In particular, method 300 determines the workspace for the employee and transmits a location of workspace to the employee. The method 300 comprises steps for retrieving the parameters relating to the sessions scheduled for the workday, determining the workspace for the employee based on the parameters, and transmitting the location of the workspace to the employee.

In step 301, the recommendation engine 111 processes the information stored on the database 120 and retrieves the parameters relating to the sessions scheduled for the workday. As discussed above, the recommendation engine 111 may retrieve the parameters from the reservation system. Additionally, the recommendation system 111 may process additional information stored on the database 120, such as the location of the workspaces, a location of the conference rooms and a distance between each conference room and each workspace.

In step 302, the recommendation engine 111 determines the workspace for the employee based on the parameters retrieved in step 301. The recommendation engine may determine the workspace for the employee at a time when the employee signs into the office building. However, those skilled in the art will understand that the recommendation engine 110 may determine the workspace any time, including after a previous workday has ended, a new workday has begun, in response to the database 120 receiving updated information regarding the employee's sessions, etc. in a tirst exemplary embodiment, the employee has multiple sessions to attend and will return to the determined workspace after each session. For this exemplary embodiment, the workspace for the employee may be determined according to the following:

Wherein: i = the employee

j = the workspace

k = the location of the workspace

C = number of conference rooms

N = number of employees and/or workspaces

Xij = variable indicating allocating the employee

(i) the workspace (j)

yik = a number of sessions in the conference room

k for the employee

= a distance of the conference room (k) to the

workspace (j)

subject to: Xij e{0,l }

i,j = l,...,N

k e l,...,C

When Xij is equal to 1, the workspace (j) will be assigned to the employee (i). It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that, while the first exemplary embodiment assumes that the employee will return to the determined workspace after each session, this assumption can easily be relaxed to account for an exemplary embodiment where the employee will move from a first session directly to a second session.

In a further exemplary embodiment, the recommendation engine 111 may determine a plurality of workspaces for a plurality of employees. Preferably, the

recommendation engine will determine the plurality of workspaces for the plurality of employees any time after a previous workday has ended and a new workday has begun. This would allow for maximum efficiency, as all of the workspaces are unoccupied. However, the determination may be made at any time, including, for example, in response to the database 120 receiving update information regarding an employee's schedule, sessions, time off, etc. For this exemplary embodiment, the workspaces for the employees will be determined according to the following:

Wherein: i = the employee

j = the workspace

k = the location of the workspace

C = number of conference rooms

N = number of employees and/or workspaces

Xij = variable indicating allocating the employee

(i) the workspace (j),

yik = a number of sessions in the conference room

k for the employee

= a distance of the conference room (k) to the

workspace (j)

subject to: xij e{0,l }

i,j = l,...,N

k e 1,...,C

In this exemplary embodiment, the recommendation engine 111 recommends the workspaces to the employees such that a total distance traveled by each employee to each of their sessions is minimal. It will be apparent to those of skill in the art that explicit constraints may be imposed such that the employees that having multiple sessions together are assigned workspaces in proximity with each other.

In an exemplary embodiment, other factors regarding an employee's schedule may be taken into consideration. For example, if the employee has scheduled online meetings, the recommendation engine 111 may add constraints to ensure the employee is assigned a workspace near to a phone booth. In another exemplary embodiment,

environmental factors such as current or expected weather conditions may be taken into account in the event the employee has sessions scheduled in multiple office buildings.

In step 303, the location of the workspace is transmitted to the employee. As discussed above, the location may be transmitted to, for example, the employee's email, via text message to the employee's phone, or to the login system for display to the employee. In an exemplary embodiment, the employee may accept or reject the workspace location. As discussed above, the employee may accept or reject the workspace via a function on the login device.

In the event of the employee rejecting the recommended workspace, the method may revert back to step 302 and withdraw the recommended workspace from the determining process for that particular employee. In an exemplary embodiment, there may be a cap on how many times an employee may reject the recommended workspace.

Alternatively, in the event of the employee accepting the recommended workspace, the method may withdraw the accepted workspace from the determining process for the remainder of the workday.

Fig. 4 shows a representative grid 400 of an office layout in the office building. In this exemplary embodiment, the office layout contains seventeen workspaces, which are represented by the numbers on the representative grid 400, and three conference rooms, which are represented by letters A, B, and C on representative grid 400. As shown, the conference rooms (A, B, and C) are dispersed throughout the representative grid.

However, this is only for illustrative purposes, as will be further discussed in Fig. 5, and those skilled in the art would understand that the conference rooms and the workspaces may be laid out in any manner within the defined office space.

Fig. 5 shows an example of various calculations and results that may be performed at step 302. In particular, Fig. 5 shows an exemplary embodiment of the recommendation engine 111 determining the workspace for the employee. In this exemplary embodiment, there are four employees (employee Bl, B2, B3, and BN) and three conference rooms (conference room A, B, and C). As mentioned, the conference rooms referred to in the determining process are conference rooms A, B, and C, which are shown in Fig. 4. Further, it should be noted that the tables of Fig. 5 are meant provide a progressive display of the determining process as will be described in greater detail below.

Table 1, shows the number of sessions scheduled for each employee. This is represented by yik in the formulas above. As table 1 shows, employee Bl has a total of 6 sessions scheduled, 3 in conference room A, 2 in conference room B, and 1 in conference room C. Employee B2 also has 6 sessions, 4 in conference room B and 2 in conference room C. Employee B3 has 5 sessions scheduled, 4 in conference room A and 1 in conference room B. Finally, employee BN has 1 session scheduled in conference room C. It should be noted that these parameters may have been retrieved as part of step 301. Table Z snows the determined distance of the workspaces (SI,...,SN) to the conference rooms, which is represented by in the formulas above. For this exemplary embodiment, only four workspaces are considered, wherein SI refers to workspace 1, S2 refers to workspace 2, S3 refers to workspace 3, and SN refers to workspace 4. Those skilled in the art would understand that different measures can be used to determine the distances, such as, for example, Euclidean distance or graphical distance. In this exemplary

embodiment, graphical distance is used as it measures a true distance traveled by each of the employees (B 1 , ... ,BN).

Table 3 shows the assigned workspaces (SI,...,SN) to each of the employees (Bl,...,B3), which is represented by xy in the formulas above. As discussed above, when xy is equal to 1, the workspace will be assigned to the employee. Therefore, as seen in Table 3, employee Bl is recommended workspace S2, employee B2 is recommended workspace SI, and employee B3 is recommended workspace SN. Thus, referring to Fig. 4, the system 100 determined that, out of workspaces 1-4, workspace 2 would be most ideal for employee Bl in view of his scheduled sessions, workspace 1 would be most ideal for employee B2 in view of his scheduled sessions, and workspace 4 would be most ideal for employee B3 in view of his scheduled sessions.

Those skilled in the art will also understand that the above-described exemplary embodiments may be implemented in any number of manners, including, as a separate software module, as a combination of hardware and software, etc. For example, the recommendation engine 111 and the dissemination engine 112 may be programs containing lines of code that, when compiled, may be executed on the processor 102.

It is noted that the claims may include reference signs/numerals in accordance with PCT Rule 6.2(b). However, the present claims should not be considered to be limited to the exemplary embodiments corresponding to the reference signs/numerals.

It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that various modifications may be made to the disclosed exemplary embodiments and methods and alternatives without departing from the spirit or scope of the disclosure. Thus, it is intended that the present disclosure cover the modifications and variations provided that they come within the scope of the appended claims and their equivalents.