Critical Path Method - Overview

Linarc features an advanced Critical Path Method (CPM) engine that helps you keep up your project milestones and prevent schedule slippage. By analyzing task durations, dependency relationships, and real-time progress, the system automatically identifies your schedule's critical path—the sequence of essential tasks that determines your project's final completion date. This feature provides the precise visibility needed for proactive planning, optimized resource allocation, and early risk mitigation.

How Linarc Calculates Your Schedule Health

To determine the critical path, the system performs a comprehensive analysis of your entire schedule, generating the following parameters for every task:

• Early Start (ES) & Early Finish (EF): The earliest possible dates a task can begin and conclude, based on the completion of its predecessors.
• Late Start (LS) & Late Finish (LF): The absolute latest dates a task can begin and conclude without pushing the project's final deadline.
• Total Float (Slack): The exact number of days a non-critical task can be delayed before it begins to impact the overall project completion date.
• Critical Tasks: Activities that possess zero float. These tasks represent the absolute most schedule-sensitive work; any delay here is a direct delay to the project.

Flexible, Dynamic Recalculation

Construction schedules are highly dynamic, and work in the field often occurs out-of-sequence. Linarc accommodates real-world conditions by allowing you to choose how the system calculates the critical path when progress deviates from the baseline plan:

• Retain Logic: The schedule calculation strictly respects the original dependency logic, regardless of out-of-sequence progress.
• Progress Override: The calculation ignores the dependency logic for tasks that have already been progressed, prioritizing actual field conditions over the original plan.

Because your schedule is evolving, Linarc allows you to recalculate the critical path whenever you update task progress, add new activities, and more. This ensures your project analysis always reflects the most current field realities.

Visualizing the Critical Path

Critical tasks are highlighted across both the Grid and Gantt views. This visual emphasis allows project managers to instantly identify high-priority activities and see exactly how localized changes will ripple across the master timeline.

In complex construction schedules, it is highly common for multiple, parallel sequences of tasks to possess zero float—meaning more than one critical path can exist at the same time. Linarc's engine accurately identifies all concurrent critical paths within your schedule and provides an interactive toggle that allows you to seamlessly switch between and view these alternative paths. This flexibility empowers project managers to isolate parallel risks, evaluate secondary bottlenecks, and ensure no critical sequence is overlooked when coordinating resources.

Calculation Methods

Linarc provides two distinct methods to calculate the critical path, allowing the schedule to adapt to either preserve the original planned sequencing or adapt calculations based on actual field progress. Each calculation method interprets task relationships differently when work progresses out of sequence. 

Retained Logic Method

Retained Logic preserves the original task dependencies defined in the schedule, even when successor activities begin earlier than planned. The system continues to honor the planned sequence and calculates remaining work based on the original relationships. This method is best for projects with strict sequencing requirements, contractual dependencies, safety-sensitive activities, or approval-driven workflows. The critical path remains anchored to the original planning rules, regardless of whether tasks are started out of order.

• Original predecessor-successor relationships remain enforced for unfinished work.
• Out-of-sequence progress is acknowledged, but the remaining activities continue according to the planned sequence.
• Maintains schedule integrity and provides a controlled forecast aligned with the original execution plan.

Progress Override Method

Progress Override allows actual field progress to take precedence over original task dependencies. If successor activities have already started, the system adjusts calculations based on actual execution rather than enforcing the remaining planned logic. This method is best for projects with overlapping activities, dynamic site conditions, and projects with frequent resequencing.

• Actual task progress overrides the remaining dependency restrictions.
• Tasks can continue regardless of incomplete predecessor activities if work has already progressed in the field.
• Produces a schedule forecast that reflects real-time site execution more accurately.

Use the links below to navigate to the section you need help with:

• Retained Logic- View Critical Path
• Progress Override - View Critical Path