Schedule Projects › Autoschedule Projects

Autoschedule Projects

Autoschedule is an automated way to create project schedules. Autoschedule schedules tasks based on an internal set of rules the system sets. Each task is scheduled to:

• Use availability as early in the project as possible.
• Start at the earliest or latest possible time, subject to constraints.
• Minimize the duration of the critical path.

Before scheduling, autoschedule automatically calculates the project's critical path. Autoschedule works in the following order:

1. Schedules work that has no flexibility, such as actual work, fixed assignments, and all work on locked tasks, and reduces the remaining availability accordingly.
2. Processes the remaining tasks in order of a calculated priority subject to task dependencies. As each task is processed, remaining availability is reduced accordingly.

Autoschedule uses the following factors to determine the order in which the subproject tasks are scheduled, and the factors are considered in this order:

1. The task has a Must Start On or Must Finish On scheduling constraint
2. The task's priority (lower values rank higher)
3. The task's float (lower values rank higher)
4. The task has started
5. The task's physical location in the WBS. Tasks located towards the top of the WBS rank higher

If two or more tasks have equaling factors, the next factor in the queue is taken into account. For example, if you have two tasks, both with no defined scheduling constraints and priority as 5, and the first task's float is less than the second task's, the first task is scheduled before the second.

By default, Autoschedule operates on the entire project, but does not change tasks that:

• Start earlier than the date you enter for Ignore Tasks Starting Before
• Start later than the date you enter for Ignore Tasks Starting After
• Are marked as locked or completed

  Note: You can override the task lock.

• Have actuals, except for the time period between the last actuals thru date and the finish date

Autoschedule performs three passes of the project to create a schedule that satisfies all dependencies and does not overallocate selected resources. Each pass includes a forward pass and a backward pass. To develop a schedule, the following passes are performed whether you schedule from the project start or finish date:

• During the first pass, autoschedule creates a baseline schedule and performs a priority sort to resolve potential scheduling conflicts.
• During the second pass, the schedule is created. When autoschedule considers resource constraints, autoschedule first makes a pre-pass.
• During the third pass, autoschedule recalculates the critical path based on the schedule that was developed in the second pass.

Important! You can set dependencies, constraints, and resource availability so that it is impossible for autoschedule to produce a schedule free of dependency violations or resource over allocations.