Critical Path Method in Construction Industry

Critical Path Method (CPM) is a project management method created in 1958 in American company DuPont to improve internal production processes. Since then the method is widely used in industries such as construction, aerospace, defense, engineering, research and many more. However, this article focuses on its use in civil engineering industry and construction. The method is suitable for all kind of construction projects that require many independent activities to be completed.

Critical path is a sequence of activities that lead to the shortest possible completion of the project. These activities are called critical activities and every delay in each of these activities will result in delay of the whole project. This article depicts ways of using the method to analyze projects as a several groups of activities to reduce the bottleneck points and finish the project on time and within the budget. Methodology of creation of the basic CPM direct acyclic graph (DAG) is presented in a way of short step-by-step tutorial.

Construction projects, although very complicated are similar or even identical in a way of having similar unit activities and resources. Scheduling in linear construction projects require use of aforementioned resources from one activity to another in such a way, that continuity and logic between network activities is sustained. In the article the procedure for CPM-based scheduling in linear construction projects is described and explained. Moreover, Resource Activity Critical Path Method (RACPM) is presented based on Hong Kong Polytechnic University practical method based on the additional dimension of time added to the dimension of time. As a summary, advantages and disadvantages of the method are described as well as limitations to the use of CP-method. At the end of the article annotated bibliography with reference links is provided.

Sample Code snips

This is a list

• List1
• List2
• List2

This is a picture

Figure 1: Process for Individual Assignment

This is big, italian and underlined * You can choose to work on one of two types of articles: *

Here's some links

Articles Fall Term 2015 User's Guide Configuration settings list MediaWiki FAQ MediaWiki release mailing list Help Content

Aaanndd some references

• References Cite link: Cite
  • To create a reference link in the text like this write <ref>[''link/title''] ''Name of link'' </ref>
  • Create a reference list like this one, by writing <references />