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BACKGROUND

Scheduling a large project with many project activities is a complex endeavor. Once completed, the project schedule is used in project management and at various intervals to assess progress, identify problems, and make schedule adjustments as activities are completed and the schedule progress is updated.

The schedule can be classified into a pyramid of hierarchical levels, where the top level is a summary of the next lowest level, and so and so forth. For instance, level 1 at the top of the pyramid is the highest level, and level 5 at the bottom of the pyramid is the lowest level. In general, a “higher” level means less detail about individual schedule activities and “lower” level means more detail about individual schedule activities.

To produce these levels, the individual activities and milestones are associated with the levels by coding them to what are known as work breakdown structure (WBS) packages, hammocks, or grouping codes. These summarized schedules, however, are mere static bar charts and are devoid of total floats and the critical path/s because each summary group is shown as a bar without underlying logic that interconnects its associated activities with activities in other summary groups. The static nature and lack of underlying logic limit the utility of the summaries.

SUMMARY

An example of the present disclosure provides a strategy for an interactive and automated summarized schedule on a digital canvas that includes a hierarchy of logic-tied schedule densities generated from source schedule activities and for which there is the ability in real-time to zoom in/out among the hierarchy of logic-tied schedule densities. For example, the hierarchy of logic-tied schedule densities is generated in response to and as the timescale (e.g., grid spacing) is compressed or stretched. This permits users to “zoom in” and “zoom out” on the digital canvas to observe the schedule activities individually or at various levels of summary groups that are summed-up from underlying individual activities, all while maintaining logic-relationships between the summarized groups. For instance, as the user zooms out, individual activities (or intermediate summarized groups) snap into summary groups such that the individual activities (or intermediate summarized groups) become visually non-present on the digital canvas and the summary groups become visually present. Conversely, as the user zooms in, individual activities (or intermediate summarized groups) snap out of summary groups such that the individual activities (or intermediate summarized groups) become visually present on the digital canvas and the summary groups become visually non-present.

