Ecological Design for a Network Scheduling Interface

A motivation in the design of Ecological Interfaces for process control is to augment the strengths of the human operator with the strengths of the automation in the computer system. This is especially important when building interfaces for managing the use of Wide Area Networks (WANs) in enterprise computing. This domain requires network operators to be able to control the allocation of resources and to monitor the occurrence of structural and functional failures. The relationship between the network architecture, infrastructure, traffic characteristics, and pricing scheme is dynamic and highly inter-related. A “Tetris-like”, bin-packing interface is designed based on principles drawn from an ecological user model and a situation theoretic representation of the problem space and the user's task. The effectiveness of this display is based on a number of ecological features whose design is automatically generated through the determination and selection of the interface context.