Design a Room-Ranking System for Meeting Requests

Context

You are building a service that assigns conference rooms to meeting requests across multiple buildings. Each meeting request includes time, expected attendees, duration, equipment needs, and location preferences. Rooms have capacities, equipment, locations, and booked/free time blocks. The goal is to rank eligible rooms and pick the best one.

Task

Propose a ranking system that:

1. Identifies and justifies priority factors, including (but not limited to):
   • Room usage count (load balancing)
   • Historical meeting duration fit
   • Capacity match
   • Equipment availability
   • Proximity
2. Combines these factors into a scoring function with clear normalization and weighting.
3. Handles cold-start scenarios (new rooms or new meeting types) and tie-breaking.
4. Describes how to validate and tune the weights via an experiment (e.g., A/B test), including metrics and guardrails.