Computer‐Generated Explanations in Project Management Systems

Abstract

Project management scheduling and cost monitoring systems are typically passive. While they provide the ability to store and modify large amounts of project data and perform numerous calculations rapidly, they provide only minimal support for analyzing and understanding the results they generate. While the responsibility for intepreting the results of any system is ultimately that of the user, automated generation of explanations would be extremely helpful. This paper discusses the potential for automated explanatory capabilities in project management systems and some approaches for developing them, including natural language and graphics, which are automatically generated by the computer. Artificial intelligence techniques are used for this purpose in two example systems described in the paper.