ABSTRACT
There is little doubt in my mind that human beings have been scheduling their activities for tens of thousands of years. After all, one had to decide whether to go looking for mammoth or to have breakfast first. It is highly unlikely, on the other hand, that any mathematical approaches were involved in that exercise. But some logic undoubtedly was. And not much has changed for many people since-most individual and many service decisions, and even some industrial ones, are made by people on the fly and purely by intuition, mostly based on prior experience. However, there has also been extensive progress in developing both a theory and practical approaches to solving the problem of providing goods and services in a planned and affordable manner that recognizes the many constraints that are imposed on these solutions.
