On the sensitivity of project variability to activity mean duration

Abstract Traditionally the `importance' of an activity in the PERT model of projects is measured by its `criticality index', which is defined as the probability that the activity will be on the longest path. An insightful discussion by Williams (1992, Journal of Operational Research Society 43, 353–357) revealed that the classical criticality index is not always informative or intuitively appealing. In a recent study by Cho and Yum (1997, International Journal of Production Research 35, 2737–2757), a new `Uncertainty Importance Measure' is defined to measure the effect of the variability in an activity duration on the variability of the overall project duration. They propose Taguchi's sampling technique as a method for analyzing the network. The main contribution of this paper is to study the impact of changing the mean duration of an activity on the variability of the project duration. On the way to accomplish this, we further investigate the accuracy of Taguchi's sampling method for approximating the mean and standard deviation of the project duration, and propose steps that could result in computational savings in large networks.