Visualization Techniques for Schedule Comparison

Project schedules are effectively represented by Gantt charts, but comparing multiple versions of a schedule is difficult. To compare versions with current methods, users must search and navigate through multiple large documents, making it difficult to identify differences. We present two novel visualization techniques to support the comparison of Gantt charts. First, we encode two Gantt charts in one view by overlapping them to show differences. Second, we designed an interactive visual technique, the ‘TbarView’, that allows users to compare multiple schedules within one single view. We evaluated the overlap and TbarView techniques via a user study. The study results showed that our design provided a quick overview of the variances among two or more schedules, and the techniques also improved efficiency by minimizing view switching. Our visual techniques for schedule comparison could be combined with other resource analysis tools to help project teams identify and resolve errors and problems in project schedules.