LiveGantt: Interactively Visualizing a Large Manufacturing Schedule

In this paper, we introduce LiveGantt as a novel interactive schedule visualization tool that helps users explore highly-concurrent large schedules from various perspectives. Although a Gantt chart is the most common approach to illustrate schedules, currently available Gantt chart visualization tools suffer from limited scalability and lack of interactions. LiveGantt is built with newly designed algorithms and interactions to improve conventional charts with better scalability, explorability, and reschedulability. It employs resource reordering and task aggregation to display the schedules in a scalable way. LiveGantt provides four coordinated views and filtering techniques to help users explore and interact with the schedules in more flexible ways. In addition, LiveGantt is equipped with an efficient rescheduler to allow users to instantaneously modify their schedules based on their scheduling experience in the fields. To assess the usefulness of the application of LiveGantt, we conducted a case study on manufacturing schedule data with four industrial engineering researchers. Participants not only grasped an overview of a schedule but also explored the schedule from multiple perspectives to make enhancements.