Working with date nodes

As soon as you have chosen a particular date settings for a model, you can study how these work e.g., by performing a “Quicktest” on some date nodes. 

We illustrate this by considering a very simple example with just two date nodes called “Activity 1” and “Activity 2” respectively.

The time scale is specified as:

• Year/Month/Date:
1996/1/1

• Duration unit: “Days”

Activity 1 is a project activity that is scheduled to start on “time zero” according to the chosen scale, i.e., on January 1., 1996.

Activity 2 is an activity that starts as soon as Activity 1 is finished.

The local values of the date nodes usually represent the durations of the nodes. In our example we assume that both nodes are deterministic. Hence, the local values are equal to the local factors of the nodes which we assume to be:

• 18.3 days

• 6.6 days

for Activity 1 and 2 respectively.

This “finish-to-start” dependence between Activity 1 and 2 is modeled by adding an edge from Activity 1 to Activity 2, and choosing “Single” and “Sum” as algorithm and operator respectively for Activity 2. The output value of Activity 2 will then be the sum of the output value from Activity 1 and the local value of Activity 2.