---
title: "📈 Schedule Optimizer"
url: "https://help.nodeslinks.com/en/article/-schedule-optimizer"
language: "en"
last_updated: "2026-10-19T12:25:06.027Z"
---

# 📈 Schedule Optimizer

💡 Schedule Optimizer analyses your schedule and proposes concrete changes — more crew, extra shifts, fast tracking — to pull in your project End Date or bring a milestone forward. You stay in control: you choose the goal and the intensity, review every proposed change, and download the result.

  

🔍 **What you'll learn:**

-   Choose your objective: improve the delivery date or accelerate a milestone
-   Set how aggressive the optimisation should be
-   Pick which types of changes the engine is allowed to use
-   Read the forecast, the summary and the recovery breakdown
-   Download the optimised schedule (XER) and the report

## Accessing Schedule Optimizer

Open your project and go to the left sidebar under **Assurance → Schedule Optimizer**.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/b7b9981b-fc75-40ce-825f-3ab1a0b15bc1)

  

## Step 1 — Choose your objective

You start with a simple question: **"What do you want to achieve?"**

-   **Improve Delivery Date** — pull in the project End Date by optimizing the critical path.
-   **Accelerate a Milestone** — target a specific milestone and bring it forward.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/507a9d31-44b7-421f-a8ab-930370f15bc7)

## Step 2 — Pick the milestone (milestone objective only)

If you chose **Accelerate a Milestone**, search for and select the milestone you want to bring forward.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/b1a239b4-f390-426e-bfdc-6271156b12a7)

## Step 3 — Choose the intensity

Tell the engine how hard it should push:

-   **Aggressive** — maximum compression: pull the finish in as far as feasibility allows.
-   **Conservative** — lighter touch: fewer, lower-risk changes first.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/b468d1a8-e9af-41f7-9834-1623ca9e327e)

## Step 4 — Choose the types of changes

Select which actions the engine is allowed to use across the schedule:

-   **Added Personnel** (High impact) — splits work across more people on the same shift, accelerating work wherever feasible.
-   **Added Shifts** (High impact) — extends work across additional shifts (e.g. night shifts) to compress durations.
-   **Fast Tracking** (Medium impact) — converts finish-to-start links to start-to-start with lag, where parallel execution is safe.

> ℹ️ **Good to know:** these descriptions and the impact dots are **general** — they explain what each type of change does in principle, for any schedule. They do **not** tell you which activities will be changed in your schedule or how many days each change will recover. That comes later, in the **Recovery Breakdown**, once the analysis of your schedule is done.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/bbd292e8-e321-46a4-8ac0-c78687b4429a)

## Step 5 — Analysis

Feel free to leave this page while the analysis is running. During the analysis, you'll see a loading indicator next to the **Schedule Optimizer** in the project navigation. Once the analysis is complete, the indicator will change to a **blue dot.**

You can also opt to receive an **email** notification when the analysis is done, in order to be directed straight to the results screen.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/1898b0d7-8ec7-4959-991f-6165b8c1cd73)

## Step 6 — Review the results

The results screen shows:

-   **Forecasted improvement** — the headline figure, plus a line explaining what happens to your completion date (including whether constraints absorb part of the gain).
-   **Summary** — one plain-language sentence on where the delay sits and how many changes recover it.
-   **Proposed changes** — the change types the engine used.
-   **Recovery breakdown** — the activity-level table: activity, suggested change, justification, proposed change (e.g. `64h → 16h`) and impact. Changes are sorted by impact; use **View all N changes** to reveal the rest.

Use **Download** to grab the report files at any time, and **Next** to apply the changes.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/bf1ba467-a432-4b0e-b665-998644969805)

## Step 7 — Apply & download

Once applied, the **Congratulations** screen lets you download the **Report** and the optimised **XER**. Your original schedule is never modified — the result comes back as a new schedule file.

![](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/46b0c0ef-9907-4d53-a9a4-b8a429fe59fc)