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 precedence or sequencing relationships are described using an activity-on-node (AoN) precedence network. Each activity  is represented by a network node, identified by an alphanumeric name and an integer-valued amount of time to complete. Precedence arcs connect two activity nodes, starting from the activity to be completed first and ending at the activity that can start next.

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.  Name of the activity (1-8 alphanumeric characters)
     2.  Activity time or duration (an integer value)
     4.  (optional) Names of any activities that immediately precede this one
• Note: there must be a single starting activity (with no predecessors) and a single ending activity (with no successors). Dummy nodes can be added, as necessary, with 0 time and their own names (e.g. “Start”, “Finish”).

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:

Start 0
OrderA 50 Start
BuildB 20 Start
Uguide 60 BuildB
TestB 25 BuildB
FixErr 15 TestB
Finish 0 OrderA Uguide FixErr

Class example:

Start 0
A 5 Start
B 3 Start
C 4 A
D 7 B
E 8 C D

Other example

• Construction project