© J. Christopher Beck 20051 Lecture 32: Scheduling and the Web.

© J. Christopher Beck 2005 1

Lecture 32: Scheduling and the Web


Outline Using the Web to Solve Scheduling

Problems Web-based information infrastructure Scheduling services

Scheduling Web-based Processes GRID Scheduling Workflows


The Information Problem

Last lecture, we discussed the information problem for scheduling You need the right,

dynamically updated information

Does the web help with the information problem?


The Current Picture

Suppliers

Customers

Factoryfloor

The rest of theinformation

system


The New Picture?

Sales

CustomersForecasting

Marketing Factoryfloor

Shipping

Suppliers

Competitors

Inside Outside


The New Picture?

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


Challenges for The New Picture

The existence of the information Is the information in a computer

system or in someone’s head? The form of the information

Is it just textual or randomly represented or in some machine “understandable” format

Ontologies and the semantic web Standards



The quality of the information Business processes may not support

updating the information How would you set up the business

process to gather accurate data on the processing time of a given operation?



Information integration 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

Shop floor system, customer-relationship management, marketing, …



Automated Reasoning If we mount a marketing push, we will

increase orders How do we automatically reason

about the implications of individual and combined information?



The Information Firehose 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


Challenges for The New Picture The role of and interface for the user

There will always be something that the user knows that isn’t represented

Is this true? Does the human still bring value to the

scheduling process? What style of interaction do we provide?

User is a source of information? User can change the schedule?

Who has decision making authority?


The New Picture?

Sales

CustomersForecasting


Shipping

Suppliers

Competitors

Inside Outside


The Newer Picture?

Sales

Customers

Forecasting


ShippingSuppliers

Competitors

Inside Outside


The Newer Picture?

Service Oriented Architecture The “nodes” on the web aren’t just

databases – they provide services, reasoning, and information


The Newer Picture?

Sales

Customers

Forecasting


ShippingSuppliers

Competitors

Inside Outside


The Newer Picture

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


The Computational GRID

DataStorage

ObservationData

ExperimentalData

DataProcessing

Visualization


The Computational GRID

Computing services are available to the scientific community High-energy physics, astrophysics,

computational biology, etc. Services:

Number crunching, visualization, data storage (terabytes of data!)


The ComputationalGRID Reality

Much of it is still point-to-point The user needs to organize the

interaction of machines to get the desired functionality

But people are working on all the challenges


Scheduling the Web

With a service oriented architecture, you can offer a scheduling service 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


Scheduling the GRID

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.


Scheduling the (New) Web?

UofT wants a special issue document for its 200th anniversary (in 2027)

Automatically create and schedule the process find articles, find photos, select them,

do the design layout, printing, mailing (find addresses), …

What parts will humans have to do?

© J. Christopher Beck 20051 Lecture 32: Scheduling and the Web.

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