Explaining Complex Scheduling Decisions

The work presented in this paper describes the explanation facility of an intelligent scheduling software framework that has been customized and deployed in a variety of domains. The customizability of the framework allows the software to develop a valid schedule that reflects each domain’s specific preferences and constraints. In all domains, the software quickly solves a complex scheduling problem (generally in less than five minutes) and produces a schedule that is significantly better than those reached by previous methods. The primary contribution of this paper is to describe the explanation facility used by schedulers across a variety of real-world domains to answer the ever-present question: why was a task was scheduled here and not there? The transparency to see why inspires greater confidence in the results and facilitates understanding of how constraints affect the schedule, enabling the user to further improve the schedule by assessing specific constraints. This paper also outlines future work that will improve upon the existing explanations. Author