Technical Note—Expected Completion Time in Pert Networks

This note introduces a general approach to obtain lower bounds for the expected completion time in PERT networks where activity durations are random (discrete or continuous) variables. We show that some well-known bounds can be derived as particular cases of this general approach based on Jensen's inequality. We assume that the durations of the activities terminating at a node are independent of the durations of the activities terminating at another node and that all the activity durations have a finite positive range.