Managing critical paths at plan execution

While the plan is running, to increase the possibility of having the target critical job completed by the specified deadline, the scheduler takes the following actions on operations in the critical path:

z/OS® and end-to-end

If a ready operation is about to miss its latest start time, the scheduler raises its internal scheduling priority to the highest possible value. In this way, the Workstation Analyzer subtask submits the operation as soon as possible.

z/OS® only

According to the specified policy, a started operation which is becoming late is promoted to the WLM service class even if the CRITICAL field is not set to W, if the following conditions apply:

The WLM keyword of the OPCOPTS statement is set
The operation is in execution state (started status)
The requirements of the WLM policy to be applied are met

At run time, the current plan can be modified in a way that impacts the critical paths. If, for example, you remove a dependency between two operations belonging to a critical path, the path is no longer valid and the scheduler automatically recalculates it.

When you run a daily planning job, the scheduler completely replans the entire network, considering also database updates and removing all completed operations. This means that the critical paths that are recalculated at planning time might differ from the last dynamic updates.