[GRAAP-WG] Time Constraints Profile

[Karl Czajkowski]

I think the real challenge with these repeating tasks or intervals is
to capture any significant variation in confidence, commitment,
compensation, etc.

With independent agreements issued in a stream, both parties can
decide how early or how late they want to "book" resources or commit
to other details.  With a single agreement that encodes repetition,
you risk watering down the meaning of the agreement, e.g. the provider
accepts but essentially ignores all the expanding instances beyond a
near planning horizon, or the consumer didn't really know what they
want and will end up canceling or otherwise revising the series
description many times.

Many of us already see this just with human calendars.  Some people
abuse "repeating" meeting schedules and block out lots of time with
standing meetings which they end up canceling.  Others avoid this by
issuing individual requests for each meeting, but then they wait too
long to try to book the "N+1th" meeting, and everyone is already
booked with conflicting commitments!  You really need some carefully
prioritized dialog to expand out and "pencil in" different future
goals and converge on a coordinated schedule that satisfies the group
priorities.  Otherwise, everything churns and you fall back to
immediate, greedy scheduling with lots of waste.

My gut feeling is that formalizing the repeating patterns is not going
to make any difference in solving this problem.  It could be useful to
delegate complex planning to a single planner, but eventually the real
coordinated negotiation will be in the form of many smaller "execution
atoms", each of which can be negotiated or canceled as a seperate
agreement or sub-agreement.


karl

-- 
Karl Czajkowski
karlcz at bbswl.com