Yesterday I learned about a real life online job shop scheduling problem.  In the HVAC business calls come in to the office where the office person schedules the job and calls the guys out on the road to tell them where they go next.  Sometimes those calls require immediate attention so assigning and saying when on the same day is an important problem to save money and customers.

I also was reading about influence diagrams.  I am trying to come up with a way to have succinct universal communication that can easily be transformed into something humans can understand, have powerful expressions and be easily programmed.  They don’t seem like they would be terribly useful because the text within the nodes still has to be generated somehow.

I also was considering Morphological analysis, a problem solving tool that is useful for problems where it is not possible (or feasible) to perform causal modeling or simulation (ie Wicked problems).  However, I think that I may have to modify the goal slightly because it will be intractable since the number of variables may not be known.  Either way it is still interesting.