Project Management and Critical Path Analysis: A Cellular Automaton Model
Kenichiro Shimura and Katsuhiro Nishinari
Scheduling a project is often carried out based on the knowledge of the historical experiences. Lack of historical knowledge makes the scheduling rather difficult because appropriate implementation of various uncertainties is necessary. An example of such is restoration and decommissioning of nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, damaged by tsunami subsequently occurred after the earthquake on March 11, 2011. In this paper an innovative method of estimating the project duration is introduced by the use of the Cellular Automata (CA) and the analytical and numerical analysis will follow. The project is modelled as representation of the stochastic CA defined in a two dimensional lattice where the uncertainties are implemented as the probability factors for CA update. The method provides the estimate of various tempo properties relevant to the project such as project duration, critical path and slack time in terms of the realisation probability.
Keywords: Project management, scheduling, operations research, cellular automata, ASEP, critical path, PERT, project optimisation, risk evaluation, Fukushima