Visualizing resource allocation tasks

Allocating resources-whether labor or tools-is a ubiquitous task in factories, hospitals, airlines and communication network companies. It also exemplifies decision-making problems involving complex, changing criteria and presents unusual challenges to information systems from the modeling and problem-solving points of view. We present information visualization techniques to reallocate resources for flight rescheduling. Our work, done in collaboration with Swissair, concentrates on human-computer problem solving and how visualization techniques can help users perceive the entire solution space in four abstraction models to make the “right” decision. We call our technique “coordinated visualization”