RT journal article
T1 Performance comparison of activity sensitivity metrics in schedule risk analysis
A1 Ballesteros Pérez, Pablo
A1 Cerezo Narváez, Alberto
A1 Otero Mateo, Manuel
A1 Pastor Fernández, Andrés
A1 Vanhoucke, Mario
A2 Ingeniería Mecánica y Diseño Industrial
K1 scheduling
K1 schedule risk analysis
K1 activity sensitivity
K1 project delays
K1 project control
AB In Schedule Risk Analysis (SRA), activity sensitivity metrics measure the importance of activities in a project schedule. Highly sensitive activities are those more likely to increase project duration variability and/or cause project duration extensions. Several activity sensitivity metrics have been proposed over the years, but a comparison of all of them has never been made. This has made it difficult to know which metrics perform better and under what circumstances. In this paper, an extensive comparison of all relevant SRA activity sensitivity metrics is performed using a set of 4100 artificial projects. Unlike previous studies, the comparison framework is decoupled from corrective actions (e.g. activity crashing) which allows the merits of each metric to be assessed individually. Additionally, a new metric that performs better for overall sensitivity ranking is proposed. Results show that most sensitivity metrics do not perform well unless they are applied iteratively (the sensitivity of the remaining scheduled activities has to be recalculated whenever the duration variability of at least one activity has been restricted). However, if applied iteratively, most metrics can enhance project monitoring and control, while significantly shortening project duration.
PB Elsevier
SN 0926–5805
YR 2019
FD 2019-10-01
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/29973
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/29973
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 11-nov-2026