Products
Calendar Api
What Is Round Robin Scheduling

What is Round Robin Scheduling?

Round robin scheduling is a cyclic method of making appointments or setting calendars by automatically allocating time slots in a systematic and balanced way. It allows multiple people to schedule meetings, events, and other activities despite limited availability.

Round robin scheduling reduces complexity and ensures fairness in the scheduling process. This method can also improve team collaboration by providing greater insight into who or what is available when, helping teams synchronize their calendars across multiple platforms and devices.

How does a round robin scheduling algorithm work?

The process begins with determining how many appointments need to be scheduled and who or what will be involved. For example, if four people need to be able to book an appointment at the same time, then four slots must be created on the calendar. After this is done, each person is assigned their own unique slot based on a predetermined order or rotation.

In the case of round robin, the order is on a first-come-first-serve (FCFS) basis. Once the desired length of each appointment is established, the list of participants is rotated so every individual gets a time slot. When all of the slots are full, the process continues again until all of the scheduled appointments have been completed within a certain timeframe.

Round robin scheduling examples

A round robin scheduling example would be an appointment-booking process where six customers need to book an appointment with any of the available staff. Round robin scheduling algorithms would determine staff members’ availability and then assign the first available appointment time to the first customer in the queue. It would then move to the next customer and assign them the next available appointment time, and continue this process until all customers have been assigned appointment times.

Round robin scheduling types

Round robin scheduling can prioritize this appointment booking in two ways:

Maximizing fairness, and
Maximizing availability

Maximizing fairness

Round robin scheduling ensures appointments are distributed evenly among everyone. This helps prevent overbooking or double booking a single resource. By distributing appointments in this way, resources are equally balanced with the number of appointments and used efficiently, which boosts employee productivity. Additionally, this approach leads to more flexibility for team members, which can improve customer satisfaction.

Maximizing availability

Round robin scheduling maximizes availability when it ensures that event bookings occur more frequently for hosts that have more availability on their calendars. The scheduling system will book an event no matter how many previous events are scheduled with that host.

Participants are often ranked by when they were last booked for an appointment, with the most recently booked participants landing at the bottom of the list. Any hosts that haven’t been booked are listed at the top in alphabetical order.

However, if the round robin mode is maximizing fairness, the bottom 50% of those lists are removed from booking consideration.

Head here for a deeper look into round robin scheduling algorithms.

Advantages of round robin scheduling capabilities

Integrating round robin scheduling capabilities into your business’ website or application provides several advantages:

It ensures an even workload distribution among team members, preventing any one person from being overburdened with work.
It ensures efficient utilization of resources, leading to increased employee productivity.
It improves customer satisfaction since team members get an equal workload that allows for flexibility.
It ensures the management of timely communication and execution of tasks, and accuracy in all assigned activities.
Using round robin creates visibility around the team’s workload and tasks so that everyone knows what’s expected of them on any given day.

Experience the power of Nylas APIs

Get the best plan for your business.

Talk to an expert

Challenges to building round robin scheduling

Building round robin scheduling capabilities for various calendar service providers such as Google and Outlook can be complex and time-consuming. Some of the challenges include:

Round-robin scheduling treats all processes equally, and there is no mechanism to assign priority to more important or critical processes.
Finding an optimal time for round-robin scheduling can be a challenging task, as the value must be chosen to balance the tradeoff between the amount of context switching and the response time for processes.
The performance of round robin scheduling heavily relies on the time quantum value chosen for the system. If the time quantum is too high, the CPU may be monopolized by a long-running process. On the other hand, a very low time quantum will result in the CPU spending a significant amount of time on context switching between processes. This will reduce the overall processor output and system performance.

There are also inherent challenges to building scheduling capabilities in-house. It can take thousands of hours of developers’ time to stand up communication features — and then will require continual monitoring as your organization scales or as bugs appear.

However, a pre-built communication solution that offers round robin capabilities mitigates these challenges. Pre-built platforms eliminate the need for long development cycles, ongoing maintenance and issue resolutions, and the cost and time investment required for building, testing, and deploying the scheduler.

Benefits of using a prebuilt scheduler for round robin scheduling

Using a prebuilt scheduler with round robin scheduling capabilities has several advantages for developers, businesses, and end users.

Reduced development time: Using a prebuilt scheduler saves developers thousands of hours while allowing for quick deployment of new features to meet market and customer needs.
Easier maintenance: The provider maintains prebuilt schedulers, reducing the need for in-house maintenance and ensuring that the scheduling system remains up-to-date and secure.
Scalability: These scalable solutions enable businesses to quickly adjust their appointment and calendar management capabilities to meet changing needs with minimal disruption.
Proven reliability: Prebuilt schedulers have already been tested and used in real scenarios by developers and businesses, so you know they meet the needs of businesses and end-users before deploying.
Access to support: Developers can get support from the provider for questions or issues they — or their customers — encounter.

Using individual APIs would have taken three times longer. With the Nylas Calendar API, we went from idea to execution in a couple days.

Dan Taylor

Product Manager, Fountain

Use the Nylas Scheduler to add round robin capabilities to your application

The Nylas Scheduler has a round robin feature that makes building this scheduling logic easy. With its ability to make appointments based on the first available slot, your customers can quickly find the right time to set up a meeting. You can set up rules to automatically distribute meeting requests between calendars, making the entire scheduling process smoother and more efficient. Nylas Scheduler also enables users to set appointments through the Nylas’ Virtual Calendar, which is intended for users without an existing calendar account.

The round robin feature is part of the robust Nylas Scheduler, including schedule editors, instant booking, group meetings, and collective scheduling. The Nylas scheduling platform is built on top of the Nylas Calendar API. This calendar API integrates with all other Nylas tools, including the Nylas Contacts API and Nylas Email API so businesses can enhance customer engagement across multiple communication points using a single platform.

With over 250,000 developers and global brands such as Upwork, Wix, and Dialpad trusting Nylas, you can be confident in using Nylas for your scheduling solution.