COMPARISON OF PERT AND MONTE CARLO SIMULATION

Abstract

Abstract
Risk management is critical issue for successful competition of any project. In order to complete a project within
predefined schedule it is crucial to estimate the probability of project completion precisely. The aim of project
management when dealing with large and complex projects is to identify the critical path and one or several
subcritical paths. In this paper a comparison between two most widely used project planning and scheduling
techniques PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and Monte Carlo simulation is made. PERT
considers the uncertainties in activity duration by considering three estimates of time, while in Monte Carlo
simulations the distribution for activity duration can be uniformed, triangle, normal etc. The analysis made in this
paper is based on same project using classical PERT and Monte Carlo simulation with uniform distribution of
time activity. The model used in this paper is developed in C++ programming language.
Key words
PERT, Monte Carlo simulation, project scheduling, activity duration.