Practice/Bloomberg/Meeting Room Scheduling - Minimum Rooms Required

Meeting Room Scheduling - Minimum Rooms Required

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Problem

You are building a conference room booking system. Given an array of meeting time intervals where each interval is represented as [start, end], calculate the minimum number of conference rooms required to accommodate all meetings without any scheduling conflicts.

Each meeting interval represents a half-open interval [start, end) where the meeting starts at time start and ends just before time end. This means that if one meeting ends at time t and another starts at time t, they do not conflict and can use the same room.

Requirements

1. Return the minimum number of rooms needed to schedule all meetings
2. Handle the case where meetings end exactly when another begins (no conflict)
3. Support empty input (return 0 rooms)
4. Meetings are provided as a list of [start, end] pairs where start < end

Constraints

• 0 <= meetings.length <= 10^4
• 0 <= start < end <= 10^6
• Meeting times are non-negative integers
• Expected time complexity: O(n log n) where n is the number of meetings
• Expected space complexity: O(n)

Examples

Example 1:

` Input: [[0, 30], [5, 10], [15, 20]] Output: 2 Explanation:

• Meeting [0,30] starts at time 0
• Meeting [5,10] starts at time 5 (overlaps with [0,30])
• Meeting [15,20] starts at time 15 (still overlaps with [0,30]) The maximum overlap occurs between times 5-10 and 15-20, requiring 2 rooms. `

Example 2:

Input: [[7, 10], [2, 4]] Output: 1 Explanation: The first meeting ends at 4 before the second starts at 7, so one room suffices.

Example 3:

Input: [[1, 5], [2, 7], [3, 9], [4, 6]] Output: 4 Explanation: At time 4, all four meetings overlap simultaneously, requiring 4 rooms.