Analysis of the impact of corrective actions for stochastic project networks

Abstract

In project management, a project plan is constructed that assigns a planned start time to each project activity. Based on this plan, the total planned project duration and cost can be determined. However, during project execution, deviations from the plan are inevitable due to uncertainty and variability. When these deviations endanger the timely completion of projects, the project manager should take corrective actions to get the project back on track. In this study, corrective actions are modelled as modifications of the original activity duration distributions (i.e., reduced mean and/or standard deviation) to account for the uncertain nature of their impact. Further, an analytical procedure is developed to rank activities according to their expected impact on the project duration distribution when they are controlled by a corrective action. This activity ranking is used to determine the number of actions that should be taken and to select the set of activities that will be controlled. A computational experiment on a large set of project networks with varying network complexity and network structures has been conducted. These experiments have shown that taking actions on a relatively small subset of activities, rather than on the entire set of project activities, proves more efficient, when the subset of activities is carefully selected. More precisely, the efficiency of the corrective actions process depends on both the number of actions and the activity selection criterion (activity ranking).