Although many most of the blockchain protocols do not gives the possibility to schedule a transaction for execution, there is actually a simple way of doing that. First we have to use a transaction for that there is something similar already in bitcoin, saying that a given transaction can be mined only after a certain number of blocks, like:
It practically means that the transaction stays in the pool of transactions until block number N because previously it can not be included in the chain as a valid transactions. As soon as the block N has been reached, the miners are free to mine the transaction.
The problem is however, that there is no incentive to mine this transaction at around block N. In fact storing such a transaction for a long time might be costly. As a consequence an additional incentive mechanism must be built in that incentives putting the transaction as fast as possible after block N into a block. In fact nodes can be motivated to mine the transaction as soon as possible, as only the first who mined gets the reward. The incentive mechanism, might be even pretty 'sharp' as well rewarding a transaction only if it gets mined between the blocks [N - N+3]. A timed transaction can be cancelled before the block N, by double spending it.
