AIC Seminar Series

This talk presents work on solving the problem of managing personal tasks on top of an electronic calendar application. To solve this problem, we adopted the Squeaky Wheel Optimization (SWO) framework, enhanced with powerful heuristics and full constraint propagation. The scheduling problem involves preemptive and non-preemptive tasks, with extra constraints imposed on the sizes of and the distances between the parts of each preemptive task. Travelling times are imposed by the alternative localization possibilities of each task. Ordering constraints are imposed by the producer-consumer relations between tasks. The user may have preferences regarding scheduling options of single tasks or pairs of tasks. Higher degree time constraints and preferences could be implemented as well. SWO allows for fast scheduling and rescheduling. Several heuristics are proposed to estimate the difficulty to schedule each task and to compensate with the degree of the user's satisfaction. A prototype system, called SelfPlanner, has been implemented using a client-server three tier architecture and embedding Google Calendar and Google Maps applications.

Ioannis Refanidis is an assistant professor at the Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia. He received his Ph.D. in "Heuristic Planning Systems" from Aristotle University in 2001. His research interests include planning, scheduling and constraint satisfaction. His work can be divided in two areas: The first one concerns heuristic planning systems and resulted in the GRT planner and several variations of it, whereas the second one (and more recent) concerns personal time management, which resulted in the SelfPlanner system. He has published in ECP/AIPS/ICAPS, ECAI, JAIR and AIJ. In the past he has been involved in the organization of several ICAPS conferences, as well as the 6th International Planning Competition, whereas he was PC member at several main conferences. Currently he serves as conference chair of ICAPS-2009.

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