Features
Scheduling
Schedule construction is rudimentary. Node filtering requires updating the scheduler to build per-action instead of per-activity. Multiple proposals are being considered for rescheduling, scheduling adjustment to target different attributes, as well as attribute-level goals. Other feature improvements below are related to scheduling.
Message support
No additional features planned. As of version 0.1.2, messages can be strings, arrays, a hash of alternates, a named message key, or a hash named message. Named messages are supported for action nodes and annotations. Attributes are supported in hash-alternate configurations and within named messages.
Attributes
Planned improvements include helpers to merge annotation attributes into schedules, additional reporting functions, node filtering, and automatic mapping of attributes for some action node parameters (eg limits). As of 0.1.2, attributes are fully supported in messages and action nodes. As of 0.1.3, precedence has been established for node/message attribute overlap.
Annotations
Planned improvements include helpers to merge annotation attributes into schedules. Proposed is annotation configuration per-node (with a keyname, possibly duplicated in the upper-level configuration). As of 0.1.2, annotation groups are fully supported.
Node filtering
Node activation conditional upon current attribute values and, possibly, upon total node counts (to avoid the overhead of needing one attribute per node to track this). Each filter=[...] could therefore have entries of nodecount=>name,op=>value or attribute=>name,op=>value, where the op keys are the literal key names as eq, gt, ... (converted to numeric operators during evaluation). This would permit easier "gating operations", which currently require branch duplication in the configuraiton.
Action limits
As a special case of Attributes, a shortcut of the form limit=N can be supported. While the case limit=1 is not the primary/initial use case of the scheduler, it makes sense that some events would specifically never be repeated. Implementation requires Attributes and Node filtering.
Tension configuration
Scheduling tension is currently only available for buffer time, but it should also be configurable for slack time.
Slack/buffer defaults
As an improvement, support passing slack/buffer ratios during configuration building. Eventually it will be helpful to pass slack/buffer defaults as part of schedule building: Having a value used during schedule building would permit relaxation during retries, and could be reported with the result. This requires changing assumptions in the validators.
Pre-scheduling safety
Convenience helpers for min/max/valid reporting. More complex schedules may be difficult to interpret at a glance. One particular annoyance is finding that the target time for an activity cannot be reached, or that there are too many actions to fit a smaller goal window. Recommend some convenience functions to find the minimum possible activity time (shortest path through the nodes, ultimately), if the activity can be completed at all (sorta easy to forget, and should be checked before attempting scheduling), and the maximum possible activity time (if defined). Moreover, these checks are needed to avoid hanging nodes (that don't reach finish), or action nodes with zero times (that never make progress).
Script-based tooling
Scripts can be provided for common scheduling needs. Music playlists (high count, non-redundant nodes), exercise schedules (chunking, some repeats), chores/errands (small action count per activity/category), games (rounds, countdown reminders).
Markdown
Basic Markdown support is likely to change in non-backwards-compatible ways. A written proposal might be posted to ensure support for the common use cases that would aide with faster definitions and imports.
Sample text to speech tool
An HTML+Javascript solution utilizing Web text to speech already exists to handle reminders for schedules of the form hh:mm:ss message # comment and could be provided in samples/.
Additional samples
There are three use cases that cannot currently be provided as examples.
First, something like a music playlist is similar to the base case here. This is a "large number of random choices" but "each is very fixed in time length". There are multiple potential actions to be randomized. Music has attributes (mood). Scheduling can be arranged in chunks (activities), so there are natural groupings for an arrangement. Scheduling requires Action limits, above, so currently this is slightly difficult and/or requires a helper import mechanism to build the schedules. Moreover, the slack/buffer mechanisms operate 'backwards', in the sense that music+pause periods are fixed and may be impossible to schedule within a fixed/given window of time (hence the common patterns of advertisements between songs and fade-in/out techniques). It's not clear that an arithmetic equivalent of fading will ever be supported in this library. Nevertheless, a "playlist import" type mechanism to build the configurations would be helpful.
Second, something like holiday activities. This is a "small number of choices" but "each is very fluid in length" and has limit=1. An import tool for this type of request should be rather easy, but Action limits are a prerequisite.
Third, scheduling of paired events is not straightforward. An example would be match-off lineups of N teams (eg fantasy leagues). That is less a concern of temporal scheduling and more about uniformity in the lineup. This is possible by running two simultaneous builders on the same configuration, with very fixed times, but may result in self-alignment of activities. It's not clear that this type of scheduling will ever be supported in this library.
Functional improvements
Validation and configuration build
Attribute registration is getting messy; needs more helpers, particularly for pulling attributes out of message objects. Validation of named messages, and even messages themselves, is flakey.
Object interface
Move Schedule::Activity from static functions to an object interface.
Pre-scheduling validation
Scheduling shouldn't be attempted if it's impossible to achieve the goals. As per the suggested convenience functions above, verify that the minimum path time and max path times bound the activity goal time.
Annotation validation
Annotations need better pre-scheduling validation and better separation from the main scheduling code. Currently unclear of the best place to provide those helpers, as well as annotation-group-merging functions and the associated configurations.
Slackless/Bufferless configurations
Goals can never be met if slack/buffers are zero and the activity time requested doesn't exactly match action choices. This should likely fail with an error similar to the convenience functions mentioned above.
Support full object configurations
The current validation logic assumes plain hash references in several spots, but a user should be able to build an object-oriented collection of Nodes etcetera and still call buildSchedule, without manually overriding the pre-validation flag.
Backtracking behavior
The current mechanism is primarily for safety. Better backtracking support should be possible.
Validation of tmmin/avg/max
Validation should check that values are non-decreasing.