Overview of scheduling

The basic scheduling building blocks available in CP Optimizer represent time intervals and relationships amongst those intervals.

Scheduling is the act of creating a schedule, which is a timetable for planned occurrences. Scheduling may also involve allocating resources to activities over time.

A scheduling problem is defined by:

• a set of time intervals--definitions of activities, operations or tasks to be completed;

• a set of temporal constraints--definitions of possible relationships between the start and end times of the intervals;

• a set of specialized constraints--definitions of the complex relationships on a set of intervals due to the state and finite capacity of resources.

Many of the lessons in this manual provide deeper explanations of how CP Optimizer facilitates the representation of scheduling problems.