60 PROJECT PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT AND CPM

4.5
GRAPHICAL DISPLAY OF SCHEDULES

4.5.1
The Need
Project schedules contain essential information for project planning and management. This information,
however, is not useful unless it is understood and applied correctly by the project manager. Presenting the
information in a manner that is easily and unambiguously understood is therefore very important. A
typical construction project schedule may have hundreds or even thousands of tasks each having several
attributes. Furthermore, the tasks in a schedule are often related by complex scheduling logic. A non-
graphical or text output of the schedule will overwhelm the project manager. Also, a text representation
cannot effectively convey to the project manager the overall state of the project, the scheduling constraints,
and the task precedence relationships. In other words, graphical displays are necessary, if not as the primary
medium of schedule communication, then certainly as a supplement to the text representation.
Several graphical representations of a project are possible. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and
some are more widely recognized and accepted in the industry than others. In the following sections, we
describe three popular graphical representation formats commonly used in practice.

4.5.2
Gantt Charts
Gantt charts are simple bar charts drawn on a time scale. Each bar represents a task in which the left and the
right edges of the bar indicate the start and the finish time of the task. The Gantt chart does not show the
precedence relationships between the tasks. As such, it is not very useful for significant construction
projects where complex relationships often exist between tasks. The usefulness of Gantt charts is therefore
limited to small projects or to a small portion of a large project. However, Gantt charts are easy to
understand and are good for presentation purposes. Gantt charts are not recommended as the primary tools
for monitoring and managing projects.

4.5.3
Network Diagrams
The network diagram is the most popular medium for the graphical presentation of project schedules
(Moder and Phillips, 1970; Willis, 1986; Hendrickson and Au, 1989; Naylor, 1995). Network diagrams
consist of nodes, arrows, and lettering and capture both task times and logic constraints. There are two
different ways of representing schedules as a network of nodes and arrows. In an activity-on-arrow (AOA)
diagram, arrows are used to represent tasks whereas nodes represent events or times of importance such as
the start and finish time of tasks. In an activity-on-node (AON) diagram, on the other hand, nodes represent
tasks and arrows between tasks establish precedence relationships. The AOA and AON diagrams are
equivalent in their modeling capabilities; a schedule that can be represented by an AOA diagram can also be
represented by an AON diagram, and vice versa. The AON diagram, however, is more general, compact,
and displays more information than the AOA diagram. We use AON diagrams in this book and refer to them
as either network diagrams or activity-on-node diagrams.