Force management system user interface

Claim 1

A force management system for planning, scheduling and managing personnel in an environment in which there is a constantly varying event load by time of day and by day of week, comprising: means for generating a forecast of an event load expected to occur during intervals of a forecast time period and a number of servers required to service the expected event load during each interval of the forecast time period; means responsive to the forecast for generating candidate tours for the servers, each candidate tour defining a work schedule for the forecast time period for one of the servers; means for assigning the servers to the candidate tours; means for generating a schedule for each server; and means for managing the server schedules during the forecast time period, the managing means including: a display; means for generating a schedule management screen on the display, the schedule management screen including a timescale and a set of schedule activity codes for each server juxtaposed with the timescale to indicate the server's availability to respond to an event during the server's schedule; means for generating a performance analysis screen on the display, the performance analysis screen including a timescale representation of the intervals and event handling performance data for each interval comparing actual event load during the forecast time period with the event load expected to occur during the forecast time period; means for editing the schedule activity codes in the schedule management screen to modify one or more server schedules; means for refreshing the performance analysis screen to reflect how the modified server schedules affect the event handling performance data; and means for switching between the schedule management and performance analysis screens.