CPM implements the Critical Path Method for project management. Given a series of activities their times and precedence relations, CPM identifies each activity’s earliest start time (EST), latest start time (LST), earliest finish time (EFT), latest finish time (LFT), slack, and status (critical or non-critical). The user enters a project title and list of activities. Pressing the Run CPM button executes CPM and displays the generated reports

Model input requirements

The project’s activity/task relationships are described using an activity-on-arc (AOA) precedence network. Each event (starting or ending time for one or many activities) is represented by a network node, and each node is identified by a unique positive integer (1, 2, ...). Activity/task arcs connect two event nodes, the start event and the end event, and require an integer-valued amount of time.

A project is entered as follows:

• Title. The title of the model is entered into the indicated form field.
• Activity data. The activity data input area contains one line for each project activity. The values in each activity line are as follows, separated by one or more blanks:
    1. Node number of the starting event (positive integer)
    2. Node number of the ending event (positive integer)
    3. Activity time or duration (integer)
    4. Activity description (optional text description of the activity)

Example project

A small project’s activities can be described by the following precedence network diagram.

The corresponding data set is given below, and can be cut and pasted into the CPM input form:

1 3  50 Order A
1 4  20 Build B
4 2  25 Test B
2 3  15 Correct errors
4 3  60 User's guide