The most critical path in a PERT network

The most critical path in a PERT network

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Article ID: iaor1995292
Country: United Kingdom
Volume: 45
Issue: 3
Start Page Number: 287
End Page Number: 300
Publication Date: Mar 1994
Journal: Journal of the Operational Research Society
Authors:
Keywords: networks: scheduling
Abstract:

The classical PERT approach uses the path with the largest expected duration as the critical path to estimate the probability of completing a project by a given deadline. However, in general, such a path is not the ‘most critical’ path and does not provide the smallest estimate for the probability of completion time. This paper studies the ‘most critical path’ problem and formulates it as an optimal path problem in a deterministic network with a two-attribute fractional objective function. An exact solution approach is presented for the optimal path problem which also gives the solution to the most critical path problem. The illustrative examples as well as computational results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides estimates for the probabilities of completion time that are much more accurate than those of the classical approach.

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