THE MOST CRITICAL PATH IN A PERT NETWORK

The classical PERT approach uses the path with the largest expected du ration 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 f or the probability of completion time. This paper studies the 'most cr itical path' problem and formulates it as an optimal path problem in a deterministic network with a two-attribute fractional objective funct ion. An exact solution approach is presented for the optimal path prob lem which also gives the solution to the most critical path problem. T he illustrative examples as well as our computational results demonstr ate that the proposed algorithm provides estimates for the probabiliti es of completion time that are much more accurate than those of the cl assical approach.