Critical path acceleration and simulation in aircraft technology planning

Critical path methods have been in common use in the aircraft industry for a number of years, but most often after a program enters preliminary design. In aircraft technology development studies, critical path acceleration is shown to be a natural and, in fact, necessary method for planning. An implementation of a time-cost trade-off algorithm of Tufekci is discussed. Because of inherent time uncertainty, network simulation should also be performed to develop a confidence band on the traditional time-cost trade-off curve. The network simulation package VERT is available for this purpose. Two instances of applying these two methods to plans for advanced materials technology development are reported as case studies.