Machine scheduling has long been a focus of engineering research. To stay competitive,industry recognized early that by streamlining their manufacturing processes, andautomating scheduling, they could reduce costs dramatically. Although historically amechanical engineering focus, today this kind of research is highly interdisaplanary dueto the powerful role computers play. Most of the present day focus is on the generalscheduling problem, opposed to the specific machine environments and constraintsstudied in the past. Another aspect of the scheduling problem, that may often beoverlooked, is how to formulate the problem. That is the focus of this project. Mostscheduling algorithms require very structured input files that are either created by hand orby a computer program. This is both tedious and difficult if unfamiliar withprogramming concepts.

The goal of this project is to design a system to make advanced scheduling servicesavailable to a user with little or no programming experience, such as a project manager.Important aspects for the design of such a system include, but are not limited to,flexibility, scalability, and user friendliness. All these design aspects can be met with aweb-based implementation using XML and Java. It is assumed a person using thissystem would be familiar with project management software such as Microsoft Project.It, therefore, makes sense to leverage this existing software to help formulate thescheduling problems.