Optimal schedule to minimize the expected delay in a PERT network

Resumen

The Project Evaluation Review Technique is an operational research tool designed to schedule and coordinate the activities of a project. Some of these activitites must be performed sequentially, others can be performed in parallel with other activities. It is usual to assume that the observed duration of a project is obtained as the duration of the longest path. This implies that the schedule does not inuence the duration of the project at all. In this paper we focus on projects related to building and construction industry, where the exibility in handling jobs is quite low. Thus, we assume that an activity can not be performed until its scheduled starting time despite the previous activities have nished earlier. In this case the schedule becomes fundamental to compute the duration of a project. We study two cases. In the rst case only the assumption above is considerd. In the second case we assume that every expedition of the activities over its scheduled time is useless