Prioritize rooms for allocation

Q: Prioritize rooms for allocation

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a real-time room allocation and ranking service in the System Design domain, testing competencies in architectural design, ranking and scoring functions, data sourcing and freshness, fairness mechanisms, and online evaluation and experimentation.

Q: How do I approach System Design interview questions?

System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

Question

System Design: Room Allocation and Ranking Service

Context and assumptions:

The client sends a meeting request with: (a) time window or fixed start/end, (b) duration, (c) attendee count, (d) required equipment, and (e) preferred location/building.
The service returns a top-N ranked list of candidate rooms (or room-time pairs when a window is provided) that can be immediately reserved.
Hard constraints (capacity, equipment, availability) must be met; remaining factors are optimized via a score.

Requirements

API returns a ranked list of rooms (or room-time suggestions within the window) that satisfy hard constraints.
Propose a scoring function that integrates:
- Historical room usage counts
- Expected idle-time fragmentation
- Attendee walking distance
- Equipment match quality
- Past no-show rates
- Fairness across teams
Describe:
- Data sources and freshness (online vs offline features)
- Weight tuning strategy (rule-based vs learned model)
- Safeguards against starvation (rooms/teams)
- Online/offline evaluation
- A/B testing plan

Prioritize rooms for allocation

System Design: Room Allocation and Ranking Service

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)

Prioritize rooms for allocation

Overview

System Design: Room Allocation and Ranking Service

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)