A study on human performance in graphic-aided scheduling tasks

In many industrial situations the human acts as the primary scheduler since there often exist various constraints and considerations that may not be mathematically or quantitatively defined. For proper design of interactive scheduling systems, how human strategy and performance are affected by the fashion of human-computer interaction at various levels of task complexity should be investigated. In this study, two scheduling experiments were conducted. The first one showed that human schedulers could perform better than simple heuristic rules with each of typical performance measures such as average machine utilization, average tardiness, and maximum tardiness. In experiment 2, the effect of providing computer-generated initial solution was investigated. The results was that in complex problems the subjects performed significantly better when the initial solutions were generated by themselves, evidencing the importance of the continuity of strategic search through the problem.