Treating Temporal Uncertainties Of Complex Hierarchical Data Visually

Generally, planning means to make predictions of the future. The more in-
formation about a certain endeavor and its environment flow into a plan, the
more realistic it gets. But, as predictions are only assumptions, there is no
guarantee that these predictions will actually come true. Therefore, plans
should consider at least anticipated uncertainties, others are not planable
anyway. The concept PlanningLines is specialized on treating temporal un-
certainties in plans visually. This work is an attempt to evaluate Planning-
Lines in a modern visualization. Further, also the technical realization of
such an Information Visualization is of special interest.
This thesis especially treats two different domains of planning: The man-
agement discipline Project Management which supports planning in orga-
nizations and the scientific discipline Protocol Based Care which provides
medical treatment plans as protocols. Both, Project Management and Pro-
tocol Based Care, provide different concepts of handling plans. A common
technique is the splitting of a whole plan into several manageable tasks that
must be fulfilled in a specified sequence to meet the goal of an endeavor.
That means, a plan is hierarchically decomposed, furthermore, it depends
on time.
Especially, the factor time is afflicted with a lot of uncertainties which
should be considered in a plan. A time schedule that does not work may
endanger the progress of a plan or can even cause a complete fail. To mini-
mize this risk, some techniques to consider temporal uncertainties within a
plan are available. The concept PlanningLines treats such uncertainties by
applying a set of time attributes to each task which are represented visually.
To evaluate PlanningLines, a prototype was developed which applies this
concept to MS-Project and Asbru plans. Besides implementing the graph-
ical notation of PlanningLines, the prototype also provides some general
techniques of Information Visualization. The result is a modern and highly
interactive application which demonstrates the power of PlanningLines in
practice and illustrates a way of treating temporal uncertainties visually.