Temporal analysis, cost minimization, and the scheduling of projects with stochastic evolution structure

This paper gives an introduction to analytical network techniques for dealing with projects with stochastic evolution structure and feedback. Temporal analysis, cost minimization, and the scheduling of such projects under limited resources are discussed. The networks most commonly used to model these projects have several different node types, vector-valued arc weights, and cycles. They are called GERT networks. Specific properties of various classes of GERT networks are presented which can be exploited efficiently to solve certain scheduling problems. Examples and applications of these appropriate GERT networks are given.