Cognition, tasks and planning: supporting the planning of shunting operations at the Netherlands Railways

Abstract

One of the issues in planning research and planning practice are their apparent incompatibility. Various fields study aspects of planning, but too little is jointly used in practice. Starting from the human planner as a cognitive system, we elaborate the mixed initiative approach, in which we combine three fields: cognitive aspects of the task of the human planner, computer support, and algorithms. In this article, we argue that algorithms should be created for planners’ subtasks rather than for planning problems. We demonstrate this in a prototype that we developed for a shunting planning project we are involved in at the Netherlands Railways [Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS)]. In this project, a task analysis resulted in a planning support system with bottom up designed scheduling algorithms.