Aleatory uncertainty quantification of project resources and its application to project scheduling

Abstract

The extant literature offers little basis for uncertainty analysis of resource acquisition in project management. Within the spirit of reliability theory, the present paper attempts to fill this gap by taking a success-oriented view of acquiring the required resources for completing a project. In this context, the Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) is constructed to quantify the aleatory uncertainty in resource acquisition by taking into account the supply of and demand for every resource, as well as the probability that the resource is available when it is required. Further, this article generates a new schedule sensitivity index that accounts for uncertainty in both time duration and resource acquisition of project activity. This paper compares the effectiveness of the proposed index in evaluating the relative importance of activities in stochastic project networks. The new index proves better performance due to its ability to capture uncertainty in both time duration and resource acquisition of project activity.