16.5. Integration with Human Planners (Politics)

A good Planner implementation beats any good human planner for non-trivial datasets. Many human planners fail to accept this, often because they feel threatened by an automated system.

But despite that, both can benefit if the human planner acts as supervisor to Planner:

  • The human planner defines and validates the score function.

    • Some examples expose a Parametrization object, which defines the weight for each score constraint. The human planner can then tweak those weights at runtime.
    • When the business changes, the score function often needs to change too. The human planner can notify the developers to add, change or remove score constraints.

  • The human planner is always in control of Planner.

    • As shown in the course scheduling example, the human planner can lock 1 or more planning variables to a specific planning value and make those immovable. Because they are immovable, Planner does not change them: it optimizes the planning around the enforcements made by the human. If the human planner locks all planning variables, he/she sidelines Planner completely.
    • In a prototype implementation, the human planner might use this occasionally. But as the implementation matures, it must become obsolete. But do keep the feature alive: as a reassurance for the humans. Or in case that one day the business changes dramatically before the score constraints can be adjusted.

Therefore, it’s often a good idea to involve the human planner in your project.