Abstract: An appointment booking and scheduling system is described, for booking appointments with operatives (e.g. service engineers) visiting customer sites within a defined geographic area. The system includes a table for storing a number of routes, each of which specifies a sequence of regions to be visited by a particular operative, and jobs to be performed by the operative in each of the regions. An appointment server is provided for offering appointments at specified times, using the table to check for availability of operatives in specified regions at specified times, and for inserting new jobs in the routes to reflect booked appointments. A scheduler periodically updates the routes e.g by means of a simulated annealing process, to generate a new set of routes.