A new approach to find project characteristics and multiple possible critical paths in a fuzzy project network

Graphs are widely used to represent data and relationships. Among all graphs, a particularly useful family is the family of trees. In this paper, we utilize a rooted tree to describe a fuzzy project network as it enables simplification in finding earliest starting times and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to express the operation times for all activities in project network. As there is an increasing demand that the decision maker needs “Multiple possible critical paths” to decrease the decision risk for project management, in this paper, we introduce an effective graphical method to compute project characteristics such as total float, earliest and latest times of activities in fuzzy project network and a new ranking to find possible critical paths. Numerical example is provided to explain the proposed procedure in detail; the results have shown that the procedure is very useful and flexible in finding total floats. By comparing the critical paths obtained by this method with the previous methods, it is shown that the proposed method is effective in finding possible critical paths.