This contribution reports on the considerable effort made recently towards extending and applying well-established timed automata technology to optimal scheduling and planning problems. The effort of the authors in this direction has to a large extent been carried out as part of the European projects VHS [20] and AMETIST [16] and are available in the recently released UPPAAL CORA [12], a variant of the real-time verification tool UPPAAL [18, 5] specialized for cost-optimal reachability for the extended model of so-called priced timed automata.