Precedence permutation patterns creating criticality constellations: Exploring a conjecture on nonlinear activities with continuous links

Lucko Gunnar () and Su Yi ()
Additional contact information
Lucko Gunnar: Catholic University of America, Washington DC, USA
Su Yi: Postdoctoral Research Associate Department of Civil Engineering Catholic University of America, Washington DC, USA

Organization, Technology and Management in Construction, 2018, vol. 10, issue 1, 1674-1683

Abstract: The inaugural challenge of the 2016 Creative Construction Conference has posed two related questions on how many possible criticality constellations with different behaviors for delays and acceleration exist and how said constellations can occur for nonlinearly and monotonously progressing activities that have continuous relations. This paper systematically solves these questions by performing a thorough literature review, assembling theoretical foundations for link constellations, performing a computer simulation of all possible permutations, and providing a mathematical proof by contradiction. It is found that (for the initially assumed self-contained activities in a network schedule that exhibit only a linearly growing production), three newly hypothesized criticality constellations cannot exist. Nonlinear activity constellations with diverging or converging relative pro­ductivities are examined next. Lags in networks become buffers in linear schedules. It is found that a nonlinear curvature of the progress may induce middle-to-middle relations besides those between start and finish. If multiple curvatures are allowed, then partial segments can form relations, which increase the number of criticality constellations. This paper is extended from the 2017 Procedia Engineering conference version.

Keywords: precedence diagramming; link constellations; continuous precedence relations; classification of critical activities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/otmcj-2016-0023 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:otamic:v:10:y:2018:i:1:p:1674-1683:n:1

DOI: 10.1515/otmcj-2016-0023

Access Statistics for this article

Organization, Technology and Management in Construction is currently edited by Mladen Radujković

More articles in Organization, Technology and Management in Construction from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().