1. © J. Christopher Beck 20081 Lecture 33: Scheduling and the Web

2. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 2 Outline Using the Web to Solve Scheduling Problems Web-based information infrastructure Scheduling services Scheduling Web-based Processes GRID Scheduling Workflows

3. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 3 Readings P Ch 14.6

4. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 4 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?

5. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 5 The Current Picture Suppliers Customers Factory floor The rest of the information system

6. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 6 The New Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

7. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 7 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

8. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 8 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

9. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 9 Challenges for The New Picture 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 Capture Problem

10. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 10 Challenges for The New Picture 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, …

11. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 11 Interoperability Process Modeler (ProCAP / KBSI) Simulator (Quest / Dessault) Scheduler (ILOG Scheduler) Process Planner (MetCAPP/Agiltech)

12. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 12 Challenges for The New Picture 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?

13. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 13 Challenges for The New Picture 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

14. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 14 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?

15. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 15 The New Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

16. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 16 The Newer Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

17. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 17 The Newer Picture? Service Oriented Architecture The “nodes” on the web aren’t just databases – they provide services, reasoning, and information

18. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 18 The Newer Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

19. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 19 The Newer Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

20. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 20 The Newer Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

21. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 21 The Newer Picture? Sales Customers Forecasting MarketingFactory floor Shipping Suppliers Competitors InsideOutside

22. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 22 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

23. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 23 The Computational GRID Data Storage Observation Data Experimental Data Processing Visualization

24. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 24 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!)

25. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 25 The Computational GRID 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

26. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 26 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

27. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 27 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

28. © J. Christopher Beck 2008 28 Scheduling the (New) Web? UofT wants a special issue document for its 200 th 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?