  An approach to schedule development in project management is developed within
the framework of idempotent algebra. The approach offers a way to represent
precedence relationships among activities in projects as linear vector
equations in terms of an idempotent semiring. As a result, many issues in
project scheduling reduce to solving computational problems in the idempotent
algebra setting, including linear equations and eigenvalue-eigenvector
problems. The solutions to the problems are given in a compact vector form that
provides the basis for the development of efficient computation procedures and
related software applications.
