Meeting Room Scheduler

medium · interval overlap, greedy room choice

Brief-reported interview attribution (unverified): Google, Amazon, Meta

Design a meeting room scheduler. Rooms have capacities. A booking is a half-open interval [start, end) in integer minutes: back-to-back meetings (end == next start) are allowed, overlapping ones are not. find_room returns the smallest room (by capacity) that is free for the interval and big enough; ties break to the lowest room id.

class MeetingRoomScheduler:
    def __init__(self):
    def add_room(self, room_id, capacity):
    def book(self, room_id, start, end, title):
        # -> booking id (int, starting at 1), or None if the room is unknown,
        #    start >= end, or the interval overlaps an existing booking in that room
    def cancel(self, booking_id):
        # -> True if the booking existed, False otherwise
    def bookings(self, room_id):
        # -> [{"booking_id":, "start":, "end":, "title":}, ...] sorted by start
    def find_room(self, start, end, min_capacity):
        # -> room id, or None if no room fits

Rules. Overlap is start < existing_end and existing_start < end (half-open). Booking ids start at 1 and increase. bookings returns entries sorted by start.

Tests use explicit inputs and injected clocks/callbacks. No network, real threads or application-server execution is involved.

Public demo

# Public demo: run after implementing the class API above.
m = MeetingRoomScheduler()
m.add_room('A', 4)
m.add_room('B', 10)
m.add_room('C', 6)
print(m.book('A', 60, 120, 'Standup'))

Starter code

class MeetingRoomScheduler:

    def __init__(self):
        """Initialize the state described in the problem."""
        pass

    def add_room(self, room_id, capacity):
        """Implement the return value and rules in the API contract."""
        pass

    def book(self, room_id, start, end, title):
        """-> booking id (int, starting at 1), or None if the room is unknown, start >= end, or the interval overlaps an existing booking in that room"""
        pass

    def cancel(self, booking_id):
        """-> True if the booking existed, False otherwise"""
        pass

    def bookings(self, room_id):
        """-> [{"booking_id":, "start":, "end":, "title":}, ...] sorted by start"""
        pass

    def find_room(self, start, end, min_capacity):
        """-> room id, or None if no room fits"""
        pass

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