Information Visualization in Project Management and Scheduling

Previous research in project scheduling has been primarily focusing on providing efficient solution procedures in a deterministic scheduling environment. In reality, however, project manager is challenged by the conflict between the dynamic and evolving nature of project information. In addition, the amount of data volume and complicated relationships among constraints make the understanding of scheduling situation difficult. Thus managers find it hard to take correct actions dealing with constantly changing constraints. In this paper, we present a research effort that experiments with allowing human schedulers to work with visualized schedules of large projects. Information visualization is used as a strategy to visually represent large data volume and their interrelationships from human problem-solving perspective. A system SWAV is outlined to support managers in making scheduling decisions under uncertainty environments. This paper describes the research problem and proposes a framework for information visualization in resource constrained project management and scheduling.