Critical-Path Planning and Scheduling.

Kelley, J. E., & Walker, M. R. (1959). Critical-Path Planning and Scheduling. Proceedings of the Eastern Joint IRE-AIEE-ACM Computer Conference, 1-3.

Type

Conference paper

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1959

Pages

1-3

DOI

10.1145/1460299.1460318

DOI registrant

Association for Computing Machinery

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/1460299.1460318

Cited from

computer_science, logistics_supply_chain, mathematics, operations_research, synthesized, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

11 citations across 11 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Bottleneck
  • The critical path is the schedule's bottleneck.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Kelley and Walker define critical jobs whose delay delays project completion, i.e. the functional behaviour of a bottleneck, though they never use that word.

    “A delay in a critical job will cause a comparable delay in the project completion time.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Dependency
  • The relation has been formalized independently in five distinct intellectual traditions: graph-theoretic dependency analysis in compiler design (Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman 2006), task-precedence modeling in operations research (Kelley and Walker 1959, who introduced the Critical Path Method), logical entailment in formal logic (Tarski 1936), semantic presupposition in philosophy of language (Strawson 1950), and obligate dependency in ecology (Janzen 1980).

    This sourceIn Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference (IRE-AIEE-ACM), Boston, MA, Dec. 1–3, 1959, pp. 160–173. Original formulation of the Critical Path Method: models finish-to-start precedence among dependent activities as a directed graph whose longest path fixes project duration.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Kelley and Walker present the Critical Path Method, representing project work as a directed arrow network in which jobs must complete before their successors begin.

    “so that it is fully completed before any of its successors can begin”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Directed Acyclic Graph
  • Project planning runs critical-path methods over task DAGs.

    This sourceCritical-path method over a task-precedence DAG.

    SupportedVerified against the work's full text

    Kelley and Walker represent a project as directed job-arrows between events, labelled so every arrow points to a higher label, and run the Critical-Path Method over that network.

    “It is always possible to label events such that the event at the head of an arrow always has a larger label than the event at the tail.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Irreducible Floor
  • Logistics and project management: irreducible delivery times given route distance plus handling minima, and the critical-path floor (minimum schedule set by the longest dependency chain), both saturate against the floor under intra-regime improvement.

    This sourceIntroduces the Critical Path Method: the minimum project duration is set by the longest dependency chain, a schedule floor no intra-regime speedup can pierce.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Kelley and Walker support the critical-path half (critical jobs fix project completion time) but not delivery-time minima or the saturation-under-improvement framing.

    “A delay in a critical job will cause a comparable delay in the project completion time.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Sequencing
  • Operations & project management: Critical-path method (identifying the longest sequence of dependent tasks), job-shop scheduling (sequencing machine operations to minimize makespan), supply-chain sequencing (order of procurement to manage cash flow and inventory), software deployment (rolling release sequencing, database migration phases), with the foundational critical-path formulation introduced by Kelley and Walker (1959).

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Kelley and Walker formulate the critical-path method, but the paper does not cover job-shop, supply-chain or software-deployment sequencing.

    “If a project does contain critical jobs, then it also contains at least one contiguous path of critical jobs through the project diagram from origin to terminus.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Temporal Dynamics
  • Temporal Dynamics is broader: it emphasizes the temporal structure of events—not just their order but their duration, overlap, gaps, periodicity, and phase-alignment.

Domain-specific

• Critical path method
  • The critical path method computes earliest and latest activity times in a precedence network and identifies the longest-duration path whose zero-float activities determine the planned project completion date.

Mechanisms

• Critical Path Method
  • Subtract, and each activity reveals its float.

    This sourceDefines schedule slack or float as the difference exposed by critical-path timing calculations.

• Dependency Network and Critical-Path Map
  • The method is old and well understood.

    This sourceDocuments critical-path planning and scheduling as a formal project method by 1959.

• Lead-Time Decomposition Map
  • Trace the critical path, don't sum. Separate serial from parallelizable segments — the timeline is the longest dependent chain, not the total.

    This sourceModels serial and parallel activities as a dependency network whose critical path governs project completion time.

• Reverse Milestone Planning Workshop
  • This mirrors reading a critical path in reverse — the late-finish view of when a thing can occur at the latest.

    This sourceComputes latest event and activity times backward from a fixed project completion time, yielding the late-start and late-finish view.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 5 of 11 citations: 1 supported, 4 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:804f0f9ec9f6 · see in the full table