Lecture 33:
Scheduling and the Web
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Outline
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Using the Web to Solve Scheduling
Problems
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Web-based information infrastructure
Scheduling services
Scheduling Web-based Processes
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GRID Scheduling
Workflows
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Readings
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P Ch 14.6
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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The Information
Problem
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Last lecture, we discussed the
information problem for
scheduling
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You need the right, dynamically
updated information
Does the web help with the
information problem?
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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The Current Picture
Suppliers
The rest of the
information
system
Factory
floor
Customers
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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The New Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Customers
Forecasting
Suppliers
Marketing
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
6
The New Picture?
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The scheduling system can dynamically
pull up-to-the-second information from
all over (and beyond) the enterprise
Can always schedule with the best
available information and can
reschedule independently
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Challenges for
The New Picture
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The existence of the information
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Is the information in a computer system or
in someone’s head?
The form of the information
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Is it just textual or randomly represented
or in some machine “understandable”
format
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Ontologies and the semantic web
Standards
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Challenges for
The New Picture
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The quality of the information
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Business processes may not support
updating the information
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How would you set up the business process to
gather accurate data on the processing time of
a given operation?
Information Capture Problem
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Challenges for
The New Picture
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Information integration
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You call it “activity”, I call it “operation”,
they call it “task” – is it all the same thing?
How do we automatically combine
information from databases that were
independently created for different
purposes
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Shop floor system, customer-relationship
management, marketing, …
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Interoperability
Process Modeler
Process Planner
(ProCAP / KBSI)
(MetCAPP/Agiltech)
Scheduler
Simulator (Quest / Dessault)
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
(ILOG Scheduler)
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Challenges for
The New Picture
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Automated Reasoning
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If we mount a marketing push, we will
increase orders
How do we automatically reason about
the implications of individual and
combined information?
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Challenges for
The New Picture
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The Information Firehose
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Be careful what you wish for
Imagine all the information is available:
how do you find, filter, recognize the
information that is important for your task?
Like trying to drink from a firehose
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Challenges for
The New Picture
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The role of and interface for the user
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There will always be something that the
user knows that isn’t represented
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Is this true?
Does the human still bring value to the
scheduling process?
What style of interaction do we provide?
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User is a source of information?
User can change the schedule?
Who has decision making authority?
© J. Christopher
 Beck 2008
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The New Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Customers
Forecasting
Suppliers
Marketing
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
15
The Newer Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Forecasting
Customers
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Suppliers
Marketing
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
16
The Newer Picture?
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Service Oriented Architecture
The “nodes” on the web aren’t just
databases – they provide services,
reasoning, and information
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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The Newer Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Forecasting
Customers
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Suppliers
Marketing
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
18
The Newer Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Forecasting
Customers
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Suppliers
Marketing
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
19
The Newer Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Forecasting
Customers
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Suppliers
Marketing
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
20
The Newer Picture?
Competitors
Sales
Forecasting
Customers
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Suppliers
Marketing
Factory
floor
Shipping
Inside
Outside
21
The Newer Picture
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All the challenges (and
more) of the “new
picture” apply here
But there is an example
of something like this in
the high performance
scientific computing
world: The GRID
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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The Computational GRID
Observation
Data
Visualization
Experimental
Data
Data
Storage
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
Data
Processing
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The Computational GRID
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Computing services are available to the
scientific community
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High-energy physics, astrophysics,
computational biology, etc.
Services:
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Number crunching, visualization, data
storage (terabytes of data!)
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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The Computational
GRID Reality
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Much of it is still point-to-point
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The user needs to organize the interaction
of machines to get the desired functionality
But people are working on all the
challenges
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Scheduling the Web
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With a service oriented architecture,
you can offer a scheduling service
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e.g. rental car reservation scheduling,
transportation scheduling, …
But, you also have the problem of
“scheduling” (i.e., coordinating) a set of
services to form some business process
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Scheduling the GRID
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You want to pull data from specific
databases, run specific transformations
and combinations, and visualize it
Ideally, you’d like to specify this at a
high level and have automated planning
and scheduling tools take care of it
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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Scheduling the (New) Web?
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
UofT wants a special issue document
for its 200th anniversary (in 2027)
Automatically create and schedule the
process
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find articles, find photos, select them, do
the design layout, printing, mailing (find
addresses), …
What parts will humans have to do?
© J. Christopher Beck 2008
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