Patent ID: 7024371

Claim:
A high availability planning and scheduling system, comprising: a plurality of high availability (HA) systems coupled to one or more external systems using a message bus, each HA system including: an HA server operable to receive and queue requests received from the external systems; and an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) engine operable to: receive a request from the HA server; process the request using planning information stored in memory of the HA system; modify the planning information according to the processing of the request; and generate a response to the external system from which the request originated; and a message manager operable to direct each request received from an external system to an appropriate HA system using the message bus, wherein: the plurality of HA systems comprise: a first primary HA system operable to process requests requiring modification of the planning information; a second primary HA system operable to replace the first primary HA system and process requests requiring modification of the planning information; and one or more secondary HA systems operable to process requests not requiring modification of the planning information, the second primary HA system further operable to communicate planning information to one or more of the secondary HA systems after replacing the first primary HA system.