Operation Planning and Control
Operation Planning and Control (OPC) is a system that originally (as an idea) was supposed to make the use of operators in EDP superfluous or to severely restrict it. This should exclude the potential "human error source" as far as possible.
The OPC system enables the planners (work planners) of the daily processes on an IBM computer system to plan the necessary program and job processes, including the interdependencies of the jobs to be taken into account, for a year in advance, This means that these jobs start automatically and, if they end without errors, automatically enable the start of the next job or the next dependent application (grouping of several jobs).
There are various options for scheduling in the OPC. Thus, rules can be used to determine that an application z. B. daily, weekly, every third Wednesday of the month or every working day in calendar week 40 starts. Fixed dates for the start are controlled via a calendar. A certain event can also trigger the start.
In the mid-1990s, IBM bundled the system management software in its subsidiary Tivoli . The OPC software was renamed IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS) . This can run on the following platforms and topologies :
- Mainframe : IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for z / OS;
- UNIX , Linux or Windows servers: IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler;
- Business software such as SAP , Oracle or PeopleSoft : IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for Applications;
- Meshed or dynamic networks : IBM Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker.