Question

What is the goal of a critical path problem?If you are dispatching delivery trucks in a small geographic area, would you use a max-flow, critical-path or minimum cost network flow model?

Answer 1

Critical Path Method technique is especially undertaken to analyze the complex issues pertaining to the Time management, by differentiating the Critical activities from that of the non-critical ones in order to in order to ensure the smooth implementation of processes. The goal of Critical Path Method is to determining the float i.e. the slack time in the field of the Critical path with any slip in it causing an overall delay in the whole process. One could analyze a condition on the basis of the floats in the critical path. In Project Management, ff an activity has few floats in the Project process, on a Critical path method instead of desired zero float, then that would mean that there would be many slacks in the process that could result into delay if all such floats are on the Critical Path Method and hence in such a case, the completion schedule could not be met.. But if these floats do not fall on the Critical path but on the non-critical paths instead, then the total float on the non-critical path needs to be calculated in order to ascertain critical path drag of an activity i.e. the total amount of time that is added in the overall activity. Then, all these floats need to be added to the critical path method to ascertain the Project’s duration.

If I were dispatching delivery trucks in a small geographic area, I would use the minimum cost network flow model because the idea would be to reach to the customers by minimizing the cost of carrying by routing the goods in a manner that it facilitates the incurring of the cheapest cost in the route