The general problems to be solved by the Scheduling Tool are the following:

• to provide reliable and easy to use utility that automatically schedules instructors' courses, class rooms, and time slots based on individual instructor preferences, available rooms, and available courses without time, classroom, or instructor conflict
• to provide a database of instructors, courses, and classrooms
• to provide a reliable and easy to use editing utility for schedules that have been generated where the scheduling administrator is notified of any conflicts that may occur when they edit the schedule
• to provide an archive for past schedules to provide consulting, or a general template, for creating, or editing, a schedule
• to provide a secure server where schedules and databases can be stored

Although other available software has solved these problems, be it commercial or open source, the Scheduling Tool provides many improvements on the preexisting products. Select improvements over commercially available products are:

• to provide an educational example for use in the instruction of software engineering, including and example of the practical application of formal methods
• to have readily available, fully documented public domain source code for use by others