Just-in-time monitoring of project activities through temporal reasoning

Abstract

A critical issue in project management is time and its administration. With the introduction of autonomous or semi-autonomous systems that handle tasks related to projects, time management can become even more complex. In this paper, a temporal reasoning based mechanism for monitoring the execution times of activities that are developed during a project is being proposed, with the intent of detecting temporal discrepancies (delays or activities going ahead of time). The mechanism relies on the use of Allen's interval algebra and allows uncovering concurrent relationships, which are useful to consider for making the necessary adjustments to the project when discrepancies are detected. This can be especially convenient in automated or semi-automated contexts, where activities are assigned to intelligent agents. With this in mind, the mechanism was integrated to the JITIK multiagent system. It has been tested with representative cases and has been found to detect all the situations where delays are involved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.