Investigating human-computer optimization

Scheduling, routing, and layout tasks are examples of hard optimization problems with broad application in industry. Past research in this area has focused on algorithmic issues. However, this approach neglects many important human-computer interaction issues that must be addressed to provide people with practical solutions to optimization problems. Automatic methods do not leverage human expertise and can only find solutions that are optimal with regard to an invariably over-simplified problem description. Furthermore, users must understand the generated solutions in order to implement, justify, or modify them. Interactive optimization helps address these issues but has not previously been studied in detail. This paper describes experiments on an interactive optimization system that explore the most appropriate way to combine the respective strengths of people and computers. Our results show that users can successfully identify promising areas of the search space as well as manage the amount of computational effort expended on different subproblems