Decomposition of Project Networks

Shailendra C. Parikh and William S. Jewell
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Shailendra C. Parikh: Applied Mathematics Division, Esso Research and Engineering Company, Florham Park, New Jersey
William S. Jewell: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Center, University of California, Berkeley

Management Science, 1965, vol. 11, issue 3, 444-459

Abstract: This paper considers "critical path" networks which are used for the planning and scheduling of projects that consist of well defined sequences of individual activities. When the number of activities is large, it becomes difficult to prepare a network for the project as one unit, and it may also be difficult to store the network in the high speed memory of a digital computer. Also, in the cases where there are two or more independent projects, which are weakly inter-related by common activities, the problem of efficient scheduling of all the projects becomes quite difficult. This paper presents a method to "tear" or "decompose" a project network into several subnetworks, schedule the subnetworks and then to put the subnetworks back together. A computational algorithm is first given for time-only networks; then two computational formulations are given for cost-time network of project subnetworks. The latter essentially generalize the algorithm due to Fulkerson, in order to handle piecewise linear, convex, cost-time curves for some or all of the activities.

Date: 1965
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