Design-to-Criteria Scheduling: Managing Complexity through Goal-Directed Satisficing

Research Papers

Scheduling complex problem solving tasks, where tasks are interrelated and there are multiple different ways to go about achieving a particular task, is an imprecise science and the justification for this lies soundly in the combinatorics of the scheduling problem. Intractable problems require approximate solutions. We have developed a new domainindependent approach to task scheduling called Design-to- Criteria that controls the combinatorics via a satisficing methodology and custom designs schedules to meet a particular client’s goal criteria. In Design-to-Criteria, criteriadirected focusing, approximation, and heuristics, in conjunction with soft client goal criteria are used to make the scheduling problem tractable.