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Preparing vehicles and payloads for launch is an extremely complex process involving thousands of operations for each mission.
Because the equipment and facilities required to carry out these operations are extremely expensive and limited in number
(often operating at or beyond their capacity), optimal assignment and efficient use is critically important.
Overlapping missions that compete for the same resources, ground rules, safety requirements,
and the unique needs of processing vehicles and payloads destined for space
impose numerous complex constraints that must be satisfied by the schedules.
Traditional scheduling systems use simple algorithms and criteria when selecting the next activity to
schedule and when assigning resources and times to each activity.
However, schedules generated by these simple and generic decision rules are frequently far from optimal.
To solve complex, mission-critical scheduling problems and predict possible problem areas,
NASA employed expert human schedulers who
used their judgement, experience, and rules of thumb to determine where things should happen,
whether they will happen on time, and whether the requested resources are actually necessary.
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