The CPM Procedure

This section provides a detailed outline of the use of the CPM procedure. The material is organized in subsections that describe different aspects of the procedure. They have been placed in increasing order of functionality. The first section describes how to use PROC CPM to schedule a project subject only to precedence constraints. The next two sections describe some of the features that enable you to control the units of duration and specify nonstandard precedence constraints. In the section Time-Constrained Scheduling, the statements needed to place time constraints on the activities are introduced. the section Finish Milestones describes some options controlling the treatment of milestones.

The section OUT= Schedule Data Set describes the format of the schedule output data set (the Schedule data set). The section Multiple Calendars deals with calendar specifications for the different activities.

The section Baseline and Target Schedules describes how you can save specific schedules as baseline or target schedules. The section Progress Updating describes how to incorporate the actual start and finish times for a project that is already in progress. The section Resource-Driven Durations and Resource Calendars describes how the WORK variable can be used to specify resource-driven durations and the effect of resource calendars on the activity schedules.

Next, the section Resource Usage and Allocation pertains to resource usage and resource-constrained scheduling and describes how to specify information about the resources and the resource requirements for the activities. The scheduling algorithm is also described in this section and some advanced features such as alternate resources, auxiliary resources, negative resource requirements, and so on, are discussed under separate subsections.

The section RESOURCEOUT= Usage Data Set describes the format of the resource usage output data set (the Usage data set) and explains how to interpret the variables in it.

When resource-driven durations are specified or resource calendars are in effect, each resource used by an activity may have a different schedule. In this case, the Resource Schedule data set, described in the section RESOURCESCHED= Resource Schedule Data Set, contains the individual resource schedules for each activity.

The section Multiproject Scheduling describes how you can use PROC CPM when there are multiple projects that have been combined together in a multiproject structure.

PROC CPM also defines a macro variable that is described in the "Macro Variable _ORCPM_" section.

Table 4.9 in the section Input Data Sets and Related Variables lists all the variables used by the CPM procedure and the data sets that contain them. Table 4.10 in the section Missing Values in Input Data Sets lists all of the variables in the different input data sets and describes how PROC CPM treats missing values corresponding to each of them. Finally, the section FORMAT Specification underlines the importance of associating the correct FORMAT specification with all the date-type variables, and the section Computer Resource Requirements indicates the storage and time requirements of the CPM procedure.