Managing Personal Tasks with Time Constraints and Preferences

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This paper treats the problem of managing personal tasks, through an adaptation of the Squeaky Wheel Optimization (SWO) framework, enhanced with powerful heuristics and full constraint propagation. The 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 are supported 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. Experimental results show that this approach is remarkably effective and efficient.