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The NETDRAW Procedure

Overview

The NETDRAW procedure draws a network diagram of the activities in a project. Boxes (or nodes) are used to represent the activities, and lines (or arcs) are used to show the precedence relationships among the activities. Though the description of the procedure is written using project management terminology, PROC NETDRAW can be used to draw any network like an organizational chart or a software flow diagram. The only information required by the procedure for drawing such a diagram is the name of each activity in the project (or node in the network) and a list of all its immediate successor activities (or nodes connected to it by arcs). Note that project networks are acyclic. However, the procedure can also be used to draw cyclic networks by specifying explicitly the coordinates for the nodes or by requesting the procedure to break the cycles in an arbitrary fashion.

The ACTNET statement in the NETDRAW procedure is designed to draw activity networks that represent a project in Activity-On-Node (AON) format. All network information is contained in SAS data sets. The input data sets used by PROC NETDRAW and the output data set produced by the procedure are as follows:

There are two issues that arise in drawing and displaying a network diagram: the layout of the diagram and the format of the display. The layout of the diagram consists of placing the nodes of the network and routing the arcs of the network in an appropriate manner. The format of the display includes the size of the nodes, the distance between nodes, the color of the nodes and arcs, and the information that is placed within each node. There are several options available in the ACTNET statement that enable you to control the format of the display and the layout of the diagram; these options and their uses are explained in detail later in this chapter.

Following is a list of some of the key aspects of the procedure:

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