See the following example which will tell you the main purpose of dummy activity

and where dummy activity is used.

Suppose we have the following project of jobs with their immediate predecessors.

Jobs Immediate
predecessors
A -
B -
C A, B
D A

Draw the network diagram.

Solution:

The above diagram is wrong because A,B are Immediate predecessors of C and D but
according to our given problem A should alone be the Immediate predecessor of D.
For such situations when an activity is common immediate predecessor of two or
more jobs we introduce dummy activity and dummy activity consumes no time and
resource.Below is the correct diagram, as you can see that A,B is the Immediate
predecessor of C and A is the Immediate predecessor of D.