The classical colouring models are well known thanks in large part to
their applications to scheduling type problems; we describe the basic
concepts of colourings together with a number of variations and
generalisations arising from scheduling problems such as the creation
of school schedules. Some exact and heuristic algorithms will be
presented, and we will sketch solution methods based on tabu search to
find approximate solutions to large problems. Finally we will also
mention the use of colourings for creating schedules in sports leagues
and for computer file transfer problems. This paper is an extended
version of [37].