The Evolution of Scheduling Applications and Tools

The available tools and support for building planning and scheduling systems and applications have been steadily improving for decades. At the same time, the scope, scale, and complexity of the problems to be addressed has been increasing. In this column, I discuss several different scheduling applications developed over the past 25 years, and then describe the tools and techniques used in addressing these problems, showing how improved tools simplified (and in some cases enabled) the solution of problems of increasing difficulty.