A Study of Approximating the Moments of the Job completion Time in PERT Networks

The importance of proper management of projects has not gone unrecognized in industry and academia. Consequently tools like Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) for project planning have been the focus of attention of both practitioners and researchers. Determination of the Time to Complete the Job (TCJ) in PERT networks is important for planning and bidding purposes. The complexity involved in accurately determining the TCJ has led to the development of many approximating procedures. Most of them ignore the dependence between paths in the network. We propose an approximation to determine the TCJ which explicitly recognizes this dependency. Experimental results which demonstrate the accuracy of our approximation for a wide variety of networks are presented