Optimistic Scheduling: facilitating the collaboration by prioritizing the individual needs

The collaboration among people is one of the key factors for the optimization of many processes and activities. The efficiency and the effectiveness of the collaboration has an intrinsic value which significantly affects performances and outcomes, at a quantitative and a qualitative level both. Open communities, as well as spontaneous or predefined v i rtual o r ganizations, a r e d e manding f o r a m o re s o lid a n d c o nsistent support for activity scheduling and managing in a context of flexibility a nd r espect o f i ndividual n eeds. T his paper proposes a privacy-friendly model that can be materialized in concrete tools and applications to support virtual organizations in the scheduling and management of the most valuable resource: the time. The model is formally defined and, than, analysed and evaluated by simulations as the function of complex user behaviours. Finally, an implementation of the basic prototype aimed at a large scale deployment is described.