About Autoschedule

Autoschedule is an automated way to create project schedules. Autoscheduling helps model your plan and generate dates for your tasks and overall project. Autoschedule is designed to schedule project tasks while minimizing the delays and expansions that can cause deadline slippage, while eliminating or minimizing resource over-allocation.

Use Autoschedule to update the project schedule after you or others make small, quick changes to it. You can review your changes before publishing them as the plan or record (POR), and accordingly arrive at a practical result.

Autoschedule uses task duration, task date constraints, priority order, dependency information, and related date and resource logic to identify the project critical path and schedules tasks. Each task is scheduled:

To use availability as early in the project as possible
To start at the earliest or latest possible time, subject to date constraints
To minimize the duration of the critical path

Note: You must have the Project - Schedule In Browser access right to autoschedule in the Gantt view.

The critical path determines the earliest finish date of the project. Autoschedule uses the critical path information to make the following scheduling adjustments:

Determines early and late start and finish dates for each task.
Moves the early start forward or back, as applicable.
Checks for load patterns that are set to fixed, and adjusts early start and finish dates to fit.
Builds new ETC curves based on the recalculated early start and finish dates for the tasks, and subtracts as applicable from remaining resource availability.
To eliminate or minimize resource over-allocation, calculations can move out a task finish date, or the project finish date.

Task date constraints are rules that help determine the project work sequence. For example, the task must start on, start or finish no later than. Set the date constraints on the task properties page.

More information:

Edit Task Properties

About Resource Load Patterns

Task Dependencies and Autoschedule

ETC Distribution and Autoschedule