Near Longest Path

Ravi

Have a look into this paper of our colleague Ron Winter:

http://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/Longest_Path_Value.pdf

It seems that there is no real way to calculate it.

Regards

Dieter

Ravi,

Longest path as defined in P3 is the chain of activities that have the longest duration, this solves an issue for different calendars that float alone cannot handle, float alone might leave out some activities in the chain when using different calendars. This does not work under a resource constrained schedule. This concept is extended by Ron Winter to solve the issue on resource constraining and to apply the concept to each activity instead to only the job critical path; he uses what he calls slack. You should explore all papers in his site if you use Primavera software. Maybe you can use slack value to filter near longest path, here Ron Winter can help us.

Spider Project allows you to filter for all predecessors to a specific activity and from these you can create a separate job, in this way you can find the longest path, will be the critical path of this separate job. Because Spider Project calculates true float considering resource constraining you can also include in your filter your near critical path activities based on float. Then you can identify all possible path combinations that will yield near critical paths, this can be tricky but maybe Vladimir can give us a clue.

Look for posting #102 by Vladimir Liberzon under:

http://www.planningplanet.com/forum/forum_post.asp?fid=1&Cat=1&Top=65251

Best regards,
Rafael

Thanks Dieter / Rafael,

This seems to be little complex than what i have thought of. We dont have spider here but definitely vladimir can guide us regarding the said difference.

I will go through it and will discuss further.

Cheers,

On updating or revising the logic does near critical path becomes critical ?

It might or it might not but there is a high possibility that if the critical path changes then one of the near critical path might become the new critical path.

You are right by paying attention to near critical path.