Beyond Calendar Mashups: SELFPLANNER 2.0

Modern electronic calendars offer a variety of functionalities to help a user organize her activities—her tasks and events. However, rarely do these tools support automated scheduling and rescheduling of a user's activities. This demo paper presents SELFPLANNER 2.0, the latest version of a web-based calendar prototype that helps a user to organize her activities by coupling a rich activity model with a scheduling engine. Activities are considered as having temporal domains, utilities, variable durations, and alternative locations; they may be interruptible or periodic; and they may be concurrent. The user is able to express constraints and preferences over the way individual activities or pairs of activities are scheduled. The underlying scheduler seeks to maximize the overall schedule utility using a greedy approach. SELFPLANNER employs Google Calendar for presentation and Google Maps to compute travelling times for temporally adjacent activities scheduled in distant locations.