Automatic selection of the best performing control point approach for project control with resource constraints
Song, Jie Song, Jinbo
Song, Jie
Song, Jinbo
Publication Type
Journal article with impact factor
Editor
Supervisor
Publication Year
2025
Journal
European Journal of Operational Research
Book
Publication Volume
322
Publication Issue
1
Publication Begin page
15
Publication End page
38
Publication Number of pages
Collections
Abstract
During project execution, the actual project progress shows deviations from the baseline schedule due to uncertainty. To complete the project timely, project monitoring is performed at discrete control points to identify project opportunities/problems and take possible corrective actions. These control points affect the quality of project monitoring and corrective actions, but little guidance is available on identifying situations where the control points pay off the most in terms of project duration. This paper proposes new control point approaches considering the risk, the complexity of the network, and subnetwork information to determine the timing of project monitoring and action taking. Moreover, new parameters are proposed to model more realistic project characteristics. Subsequently, a classification model is developed to select the best performing control point approach given project characteristics. An extensive computational experiment is conducted on a set of 3,810 artificial projects with diverse project characteristics to evaluate the performance of the classification model and further validate it on empirical project data. The computational results indicate that the classification model outperforms the average performance of any proposed control point approaches. The results also show that the resource variability that indicates the resource usage deviations between project activities is the primary driver for detecting the best control point approach for projects with resource constraints.
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Project Scheduling, Control Points, Project Characteristics, Classification Model