The Effects of Different Activity Distributions on Project Duration in PERT Networks

The original PERT technique assumes β distribution for the activity durations. The developments of the past decades have partly refuted this concept; and many different distributions have been introduced.In our research, various distributions (uniform, triangular, β) are applied in case of closed large-scale infrastructure projects.In this paper, the possible effects of these distributions on the project duration are investigated. It is shown that the use of different distributions with the same three-point estimation has a smaller effect on the project duration than a 10% difference in the values of the three-point estimation.