Patent ID: 8615420

Claim:
An automatic facilities scheduling system, comprising: a plurality of facilities that can be rendered operative or inoperative according to need; means for collecting data, at current time t, indicative of future demand for the facilities, wherein future demand represents a number of users entering an area which maintains said plurality of facilities; means for processing said data to generate a prediction of the demand for the facilities over a time period starting at time t; means for collecting, in real time, data indicative of current demand, said data including the number of users that have conducted a transaction at said facilities over a time period ending at current time t, wherein current demand represents a portion of said number of users currently waiting to use said plurality of facilities; processing means for receiving the data and writing the data to a storage medium to produce a knowledge base including a record of historical demand for the automatic facilities scheduling system and corresponding input parameters, wherein the processing means is arranged to update said knowledge base at specified intervals, a learning system that is arranged to use the updated knowledge base as a training input for the learning system to produce a currently learned system; the processing means further arranged to provide said currently learned system with the data indicative of current demand to calculate a schedule of the number of operative facilities required over a given future time period based on a predetermined target demand where the calculated schedule is stored in the knowledge base; and means for monitoring the scheduling system's own performance and feeding back an error signal representing the difference between the required performance and the actual performance as an input into the learning system, wherein the number of operative facilities required over a given future time period starting at time t is calculated according to the following equation: Q t + A ^ N + m W ^ wherein Q t is the number of users queuing to use said facilities, Â is the number of users expected to arrive at said plurality of facilities during a future timestep m, Ŵ the expected time each user takes to use said facilities and N is the desired number of users queuing to use said facilities.