Generating Alternative Plans for Scheduling Personal Activities

Abstract

Alternative plan generation can be used to meet the user’s preferences in a scheduling problem, when either the scheduling model does not take every available preference into account, or the user does not specify his preferences correctly in a formal manner. In this paper, an alternative plan generation method that takes into account in-domain specific attributes of the scheduling problem, is applied to an electronic calendar management scheduler in order to generate significantly different qualitative alternative plans. The scheduler is based on an adaption of the Squeaky Wheel Optimization Framework (SWO) and addresses the problem of optimizing individual activity plans (that concern activities one person has to accomplish independently of others), based on a rich model for their specification involving complex constraints and preferences and enhanced with extra attributes that measure the distance of each plan from the already found.