It is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process.
Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation, utilize maximum resources available and reduce costs.
These provide the production scheduler with powerful graphical interfaces which can be used to visually optimize real-time work loads in various stages of production, and pattern recognition allows the software to automatically create scheduling opportunities which might not be apparent without this view into the data.
For example, an airline might wish to minimize the number of airport gates required for its aircraft, in order to reduce costs, and scheduling software can allow the planners to see how this can be done, by analysing time tables, aircraft usage, or the flow of passengers.
Key concepts here are: Production scheduling can take a significant amount of computing power if there are a large number of tasks.