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Schedule Explainer: An Argumentation-Supported Tool for Interactive Explanations in Makespan Scheduling

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Explainable and Transparent AI and Multi-Agent Systems (EXTRAAMAS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12688))

Abstract

Scheduling is a fundamental optimisation problem that has a wide range of practical applications. Mathematical formulations of scheduling problems allow for development of efficient solvers. Yet, the same mathematical intricacies often make solvers black-boxes: their outcomes are hardly explainable and interactive even to experts, let alone lay users. Still, in real-world applications as well as research environments, lay users and experts likewise require a means to understand why a schedule is reasonable and what would happen with different schedules. Building upon a recently proposed approach to argumentation-supported explainable scheduling, we present a tool, Schedule Explainer, that provides interactive explanations in makespan scheduling easily and with clarity.

At the time of writing this paper, all the authors were affiliated with Imperial College London but no longer belong to this institution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.greycon.com/solutions/planning-scheduling/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/kcyras/aes.

  3. 3.

    This slightly relaxes the notion of fixed decisions from [4] to accommodate for ill-posed user queries, allowing explanations over validations of the user input too, useful in practical applications. For instance, if fixed decisions are not satisfiable, then that should be explained.

  4. 4.

    It is called optimality in [4], but we rename it efficiency instead, to better match the definitions of optimal and efficient schedules as in Definitions 1 and 2.

  5. 5.

    http://xaip.mybluemix.net/.

  6. 6.

    https://www.optaplanner.org/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ericsson Research, Stockholm, Sweden

    Kristijonas Čyras

  2. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Kristijonas Čyras, Myles Lee & Dimitrios Letsios

  3. King’s College London, London, UK

    Dimitrios Letsios

Authors
  1. Kristijonas Čyras
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  2. Myles Lee
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  3. Dimitrios Letsios
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kristijonas Čyras .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Sierre, Switzerland

    Davide Calvaresi

  2. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Amro Najjar

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Michael Winikoff

  4. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Kary Främling

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Čyras, K., Lee, M., Letsios, D. (2021). Schedule Explainer: An Argumentation-Supported Tool for Interactive Explanations in Makespan Scheduling. In: Calvaresi, D., Najjar, A., Winikoff, M., Främling, K. (eds) Explainable and Transparent AI and Multi-Agent Systems. EXTRAAMAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12688. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82017-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82017-6_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-82016-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-82017-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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