Process Connectors: Distributed Schedule Coordination Via Alternative Exploration and Evaluation

Project participants typically maintain their own schedules for a given project. The multiple views of the participants are not easily reconciled due to varying levels of detail and different business processes. This in turn leads to poor schedule coordination in practice. The Process Connectors project seeks to enable distributed schedule coordination via a unified, multiparty schedule representation while enabling each participant to maintain its local view of the project. Past work in the Process Connectors project has demonstrated a representation for reconciling temporally defined multiparty views across different levels of detail. This paper reports on extensions of the base representation to enable exploration and evaluation of alternative schedules. The extended capabilities facilitate schedule re-coordination in response to a schedule change such as an acceleration or delay. Specifically, this paper describes the capability to analyze a unified schedule, identify conflicts and inconsistencies, recommend alternatives, and to describe alternatives in the local context or view of each participant. The tools developed by the researchers enable project participants such as subcontractors to accept or reject changes, providing a mechanism for incorporation of human decisions and support for machine generated recommendations. The capabilities for basic analysis and exploration of alternatives at both a unified and local level are expected to speed up and improve practitioners' responses to changed conditions on projects.