• gamification
• interactive scheduler
• scheduling
• scheduling with preferences
• scheduling framework

Efficient workload scheduling is a prime means to improve the effectiveness of services to clients and to properly manage jobs carried out by the company staff. In the automation of workload scheduling, it is crucial trying to accommodate preferences expressed by individuals, who are the ``resources'' to be managed by the scheduling system.
This thesis work addresses the problem of inserting preference constraints within the task Scheduler of the LogObject company, a software that proposes an optimal scheduling of technicians allocated to maintenance activities.
The aim of the proposed system is to mimic (and possibly improve) the intervention of the Master Scheduler, a person who rearranges the obtained schedule in order to satisfy technicians' desires, using information that he/she personally knows.
The proposed idea is a Gamification solution based on a credits system, which lets technicians express their preferences in two ways, before and after the execution of the scheduler. The idea is that resources can gain credits by carrying out activities, and spend credits for expressing preferences on tasks that they want/don't want to perform.
The work first deals with a study on the general feasibility of the solution and the desired behavior of the system, by analyzing two different classes of scenarios with the help of a C++ simulation. Subsequently, a Java Enterprise Edition application, which is designed to implement the proposed system, is described. The final part shows the results obtained from a simulation on real data for the period of a week, which validates the feasibility of the proposed system.