AI can now optimize your schedule

Imagine you are trying to plan a perfect vacation in a country which is half the way across the earth, from your place. You have no idea about how the flights' schedules work in there, nor do you know about the best hotels in town. You also might be looking out to stay in a neighborhood which is central to the monuments and the museums you want to visit around the city. It takes quite a lot of time to understand the local environment and then to create an itinerary.

Planning a perfect getaway takes a lot of effort and patience. Moreover, this extends to every event and schedule management task at hand. You probably felt frustrated about the whole exercise, at some point in your life.

Scientists seem to have gotten the memo too. So researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are looking at ways by which automated planning technology can help humankind avert this exhaustive process.

The missing human factor in automated planning

One of the biggest challenges that are faced by the scientists is that automated planners do not have the touch of human intuition. Also, they believe that human insights can help improve the AI model to tighten their algorithms by up to 15 percent, on scheduling problems that are really challenging. AI-powered line planning has been improving steadily lately but other fields are waiting impatiently for their solutions.

36 MIT undergraduate and graduate students were recruited for a planning problem-solving session over two different competitions. One competition was about plane routing schedule, and the other was about satellite positioning. The automatic planners and the students were both given half an hour to solve each problem.

The strategies behind human calculation

As expected, the students were the ones who finished the test faster and had better optimization on their schedules, when compared to the automated ones. From analyzing the end results, it could be understood that the students had used a strategy called linear temporal logic.

The researchers could use the human strategies and feed it to the AI data stack. This could help in improving the system by 13 percent on the first competition and 16 percent on the second.

Implications of an automated planner

Though the system is still in its infancy, consequences of a full-fledged automated planner are profound. For instance, it has the power to revolutionize the way travel planning is done by agencies and people alike and already AI powered medication adherence is saving lives every day.

Planning strategies on the manufacturing shop floor could be optimized for maximum efficiency. This could also help in enforcing the Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing methodology, which reduces flow times within production systems.

On more personal levels, automated planners like these could help in improving individual productivity and could act as a personal assistant.

Original article: AI can now optimize your schedule at AI for Businesses - Machian Future