Introduction of deadlines in pert-cost analysis

The paper presents a scheduling method for projects that can be split into a set of partially ordered elementary activities. It assumes also the existence of constraints such as deadlines for some of the events. Since such deadlines may be incompatible with the chosen durations for the elementary activities, the present method removes such incompatibilities, it reassigns a feasible duration to each activity so as to minimize the global cost of the project. The interest of the method is to allow the conception of a decision support system aimed at the assistance of users that are working under unforseen conditions. The system helps the user for the reevaluation of the activities durations in such a way as to allow a good resource allocation and to avoid a delay accumulation at the end of the project.