Abstract: By identifying the critical path, people can effectively identify the key activities that impact the project progress. Taking appropriate human and material resources and allocate them to key activities can shorten the project duration. This paper first analyzes the importance of using risk management in large aircraft project. Then it introduces how to find out the critical path in a Gantt graph generated by Microsoft Project from the perspective of data structures and algorithms, verifies the method by two examples. Finally, the paper analyzes the insufficient of CPM and proposes some suggestions about how to improve it.

Key words: critical path method, risk management, AOE network