Statistical Critical Path Analysis in Acyclic Stochastic Networks: Statistical PERT.

Abstract

This paper describes and illustrates a comprehensive new procedure for obtaining information about the distribution of a project's completion time when the project is comprised of a large number of activities and the time required to complete an individual activity once it can be begun is a random variable. The project is represented as an acyclic network whose arcs correspond to the project activities. This network is simplified by replacing various activity configurations by single equivalent activities and then decomposed into several subnetworks. The distribution and moments of each subnetwork's completion time are bounded and approximated on the basis of two percentiles from each activity's completion time distribution by using some mathematical programming techniques and a new result in the theory of networks. The project's completion time distribution is then approximated by combining the approximate subnetwork distributions. The computer programs required to implement the general procedure are listed and documented.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1974
Accession Number
ADA003550

Entities

People

  • E. Arseven
  • Herman Otto Hartley
  • L. J. Ringer
  • R. L. Sielken Jr.

Organizations

  • Texas A&M University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Digital Information
  • Mathematical Programming
  • Mathematics
  • Random Variables
  • Software Development Tools

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Networking
  • Operations Research