Interaction in Hybrid Intelligent Scheduling

Human schedulers tend to approach their task in an opportunistic way (Woods and Roth, 1988). This requires an interactive system in which the interface elements, and their location, are not tightly bound to a restrictive perspective of the problem. The architecture of a hybrid intelligent system developed by the author is shown in Figure 1. Two types of display — the Jobs Screens and the Gantt Chart — allow the human scheduler to interact with the computing system. There is a separate Jobs Screen for each machine and one for jobs yet to be allocated to a machine. During decision making, the human scheduler focuses primarily on the Jobs Screens. Meanwhile, the scheduler keeps an eye on the current state of the Gantt chart to see when jobs are expected to be loaded and completed.