Patent ID: 7735086

Claim:
A method for planning and scheduling tasks within a plurality of requests for change within a change window in a computing system comprising the steps of: deciding whether or not a request for change should be done with respect to maximizing a profit value expressed as a value of performing the plurality of requests for change minus a value of associated costs, wherein a request for change comprises a set of tasks interrelated by temporal and location-specific dependencies; for each request for change to be done, assigning individual tasks within each request for change to acceptable servers; for each request for change to be done, assigning a start time to said individual tasks; wherein the set of tasks comprises hardware changes and/or software changes; wherein the change window describes a period of time during which a request for change is to be done; wherein precedence constraints among tasks within a request for change are enforced; wherein each task of a request for change that is performed is assigned to a single acceptable server; and wherein no acceptable server can work on more than one task at any time.