LiveGantt: Interactively Visualizing a Large Manufacturing Schedule

illustrates the exploration sequence. Three exploration steps are taken before the current context. Two views with controllers are juxtaposed allowing users to investigate a schedule from two different perspectives. (B) Schedule view gives an overview of a schedule based on a Gantt chart with similar Gantt bars around a focus time line (a black vertical bar) aggregated into larger bars. Tasks that immediately follow the focus time line are accentuated with saturated colors to improve visual saliency. In the figure above, a user is examining details on an aggregated task (green striped). The most frequent sequence after the selected task is also highlighted with saturated colors. (C) Package view shows changes in packages ’ production as parallel line charts. The slopes of the lines are represented as hue/saturation to facilitate understanding and analysis. Abstract—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 manufacturin