What is optimized scheduling?
In most well-defined scheduling problems, there are hard constraints (i.e., constraints that absolutely must be satisfied) and soft constraints (i.e., constraints that can be violated but at a cost). If the problem is even moderately difficult, there will be no way to adhere to all the soft constraints, and therefore tradeoffs will have to be made. Combining the costs incurred by all the different violations of soft constraints gives a measure of how good a particular schedule is. Optimized scheduling searches the space of all possible legal schedules for one that comes as close as possible to being the optimal with respect to this cost function.
