RT journal article
T1 Forecasting the Project Duration Average and Standard Deviation from Deterministic Schedule Information
A1 Ballesteros Pérez, Pablo
A1 Cerezo Narváez, Alberto
A1 Otero Mateo, Manuel
A1 Pastor Fernández, Andrés
A1 Zhang, Jingxiao
A1 Vanhoucke, Mario
A2 Ingeniería Mecánica y Diseño Industrial
K1 project duration
K1 scheduling
K1 merge event bias
K1 construction
K1 PERT
AB Most construction managers use deterministic scheduling techniques to plan constructionprojects and estimate their duration. However, deterministic techniques are known to underestimatethe project duration. Alternative methods, such as Stochastic Network Analysis, have rarely beenadopted in practical contexts as they are commonly computer-intensive, require extensive historicalinformation, have limited contextual/local validity and/or require skills most practitioners havenot been trained for. In this paper, we propose some mathematical expressions to approximatethe average and the standard deviation of a project duration from basic deterministic scheduleinformation. The expressions’ performance is successfully tested in a 4100-network dataset withvaried activity durations and activity durations variability. Calculations are quite straightforward andcan be implemented manually. Furthermore, unlike the Project Evaluation and Review Technique(PERT), they allow drawing inferences about the probability of project duration in the presence ofseveral critical and subcritical paths with minimal additional calculation.
PB MDPI
SN 2076-3417
YR 2020
FD 2020-01
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/22971
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/22971
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 05-nov-2026