Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 84735, 6 pages
doi:10.1155/JAMDS/2006/84735
Analyzing linear recursive projects as an absorbing chain
Department of Information System and Decision Sciences, California State University, Fullerton 92834, CA, USA
Received 15 October 2004; Accepted 20 June 2005
Copyright © 2006 Do L. Minh and R. Bhaskar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Hardie (2001) used general Markov chains to study the linear
“recursive projects” in which some activities may be revisited
after a later activity is completed. In this paper, we propose
that it is better to treat the project as an absorbing chain. This
allows us to calculate the expected value and the variance of the
project duration.