Zippin: towards a Graphical Decision Support Tool

When applied to complex environments, planning and scheduling problems can require human intervention for taking major decisions. The user(s) should have at all time an overview of the current stage of the process, should be able to simulate future executions and to explore the consequences of \what-if" hypotheses. We believe that information technology can play a useful role as a support for capturing, picturing, and accessing process information, for reasoning and decision-making purposes. Towards this end, we are developing Zippin, an experimental tool that aims to be both a \map-drawer" and a \map-viewer" for work processes. Used in either formal or informal workplace meetings, Zippin can help user(s) to achieve consensus and to engage in process reeection, planning, scheduling and re-engineering. In this paper, we describe the process modeling approach that lies behind Zippin and we give an example of how we believe a tool like Zippin can be used.