Controlled alternative activity networks for project management

This paper presents a branching network to control a project with two different types of alternative events. The first one reflects stochastic (uncontrolled) branching of the development of a project. The alternative event of the second type is of a deterministic nature, i.e., the project's decision-maker chooses the outcome direction. Such a network contains alternative nodes with different logical operations at the input and output and includes both connective and diverging paths. The problem of controlling a project is, in essence, the choosing of an optimal outcome direction at every 'decision-making' node which is reached in the course of the project's realization. This is carried out by a permanent reduction of the initial network and by applying a special algorithm described here, based on lexicographical scanning. A numerical example is given and application areas are presented.