● 2026 UCSD HDSI Capstone Project with SDG&E

Seeing the System

A World Model for Scheduling

Transforming operational scheduling into a system-level intelligence process. We move beyond task-level feasibility to optimize for risk awareness, long-term efficiency, and structural resilience.

Team: Zhenghao Gong, Bingyan Liu, Stephanie Wang, Weijie Zhang
Mentors: Phi Nguyen, Fatemeh Aarabi, Mike Hilden

Short-term Feasibility vs. Systemic Health

Why traditional scheduling pipelines miss the bigger picture.

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The Problem

Current pipelines prioritize short-term rule satisfaction. This leads to "invisible" long-term risks like overdue accumulation, regional congestion, and uneven workload distribution that only emerge over time.

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The Solution

A "World Model" that treats scheduling as an interconnected system. We evaluate candidate schedules not just on validity, but on probabilistic risk, duration deviation, and resilience.

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Data Representation

Constructed a heterogeneous graph from the CLICK dataset: 5.4M task nodes and 22k engineer nodes, linked by operational logic to capture hidden dependencies.

Graph-based World Model

Leveraging GNNs to capture structural and temporal dependencies.

Baseline: MLP

Non-graph baseline treating tasks independently. Used to benchmark the value of structural information.

Baseline: LightGBM

Gradient boosting tree model designed for tabular data. Serves as a strong traditional baseline to compare against neural network and graph-based approaches.

RGCN

Relational Graph Convolutional Networks. Distinguished semantically different interactions (e.g., assignment vs. geographic).

GraphSAGE

Scalable Inductive Learning. Aggregates neighborhood features to capture local structural context efficiently.

HGT

Heterogeneous Graph Transformer. Uses attention mechanisms to weigh messages based on node and edge types.

Results & Analysis

Empirical evidence of system-level learnability.

Graph Model Training Curve

Smooth L1 Training Loss across GraphSAGE, RGCN, and HGT models.

Graph VS Tabular Performance

Comparison of Evaluation Loss across MLP, LightGBM and GraphSAGE.

Model Representation Visualization

t-SNE of hidden states reveals a structured representation space where similar task types, districts, and departments cluster, with completion time forming a vertical gradient.

Interactive Dashboard

From predictive modeling to practical insights and operational visibility

Graph-Based Scheduling Intelligence

A web application that provides insights in task completion time and operational risk.

Data Upload
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Data Upload

User uploads a set of work order schedules to begin graph construction and model inference.

Dashboard Overview
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Dashboard Overview

Dashboard shows high-level overview of key scheduling metrics (task completion time, workload imbalance, district-level performance, etc).

Prediction Table
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Prediction Table

Per-assignment completion time predictions displays in a sortable table. Users can export data in CSV format for further analysis.

Charts
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Analytical Charts

Chart visualizations show performance distributions by engineer, department, and district, revealing patterns in operational risk.

Graph Visualization
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Graph Visualization

Users can interactively explore the heterogeneous graph, visualizing relationships among nodes (e.g., assignments, tasks, engineers) alongside predicted risk values.

Application Demo

A demonstration of our scheduling intelligence platform.

Note: Data shown in the images and demo are artificially generated for demonstration purposes.