Representational Design Principles to Humanize Automated Scheduling Systems

• Start date: 01 January 2001
• End date: 30 June 2003

Two critical issues for IT support of working with knowledge will be addressed: (1) the fundamental role that representational systems have in IT systems; (2) the integration of the power of automated systems for complex tasks with the flexibility and creativity of humans. Principles for effective representation design will be used to engineer novel representations for complex real-world scheduling problems that (a) will transform the nature of the task so that it is easier and more meaningful, whilst (b) simultaneously providing a window into the operation of software systems in the form of well structured and concise visualizations. Novel modelling and heuristic approaches to scheduling will be investigated to exploit the representations. The design and testing of the representations, the investigation of the new scheduling heuristics and methods, their implementation in software, and the empirical evaluations with human schedulers, will provide a major test of the validity and utility of our principles for designing representations. These issues integrate the highly complementary interests of the two successful research groups involved. Along with a commerical partner, this combination has the synergy and range of expertise to address these important questions