Application of program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and linear programming (LP) in project management

Throughout the years, businesses execute a systematic change, such as constructing a building, merging with another company or making a new product. These changes lead to the management of a project. To construct a project, various dataflow are required. However, project management nowadays demand more complex products, higher quality outputs and faster development cycles. This will cause massive scale of planning a project which leads to massive cost. Therefore, this study aims for an optimization in managing a project. The Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) which originally designed to plan a project that emphasizes the relationship between the times each activity takes and the resulting time and cost for the expected completion of the entire project. In PERT, a graphical network is used to illustrate the precedence or parallel relationship among the activities. It‟s also identifying the expected completion time of a project and the critical path where more resources should be concentrated to finish the project on time. However, the expected time of a project can also be shorten to a certain level by the used of additional resources which is called crashing. Reducing the duration might include using overtime, assigning more labour and using more resources such as material, equipment and so on. These actions may result in higher cost and lower quality. Thus, crashing decision can be formulated by using Linear Programming (LP). LP technique seeks to determine the optimization project cost. It is also boast efficiency of computational algorithm for problems with thousands of constraint and variables which analyse by using Excel Solver. In this research, PERT and LP are applied on a large-scale of projects which construct a new building consist of Administration Office and Medan Selera at the Main Campus of University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Mukim Padang Siding, Pauh, Perlis