Callisto: An Intelligent Project Management System

Large engineering projects, such as the engineering development of computers, involve a large number of activities and require cooperation across a number of departments. Due to technological and market uncertainties, these projects involve the management of a large number of changes. The Callisto project was born out of realization that the classical approaches to project management do not provide sufficient functionally to manage large engineering projects. Callisto was initiated as a research effort to explore project scheduling, control and configuration problems during the engineering prototype development of large computer systems and to devise intelligent project management tools that facilitate the documentation of project management expertise and its reuse from one project to another. In the first phase of the project, rule-based prototypes were used to build quick prototypes of project management expertise and the project management knowledge required to support expert project managers. In the second phase, the understanding of point solutions was used to capture the underlying models of project management in distributed project negotiations and comparative analysis. This article provides an overview of the problems, experiments, and the resulting models of project knowledge and constraint-directed negotiation.