Optimum Degree of Activity Accelerating and Overlapping in Schedule Compression
Date
2013-05-01
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Abstract
Today's volatile economy encourages project owners to monitor their project schedules very closely, to ensure timely completion. The first incentive for such monitoring is escalation in commodity price and labour costs that may easily become more than the estimated amount. In addition, assumptions about the price and demand for the end-products are based on information available at the time of the initial estimates, which can be years prior to production. Any changes in these assumptions due to market fluctuations may render a project which was previously feasible financially unjustifiable after several years. On the other hand, when end-product prices are much higher than assumptions made during a feasibility study, organizations may be willing to finish projects earlier than planned to take advantage of higher profit margins even with the higher cost. For such reasons, a reliable mechanism for calculating time-cost trade-offs will considerably assist project managers in deciding on the level of schedule compression in projects, to consider reducing the duration with a reasonable cost increase.
There are two main techniques by which schedule compression can be accomplished: activity accelerating, and overlapping. Activity accelerating is shortening project tasks' durations by incurring more cost. Overlapping is to perform the activities in parallel where in normal execution they would be completed in sequence. The amount of overlapping between two activities is expected to shorten duration, though due to the risks of changes and necessary rework, the duration saved would not be exactly the same as the length of the overlap.
The purpose of this research is to review and analyze schedule compression techniques in detail, in order to develop an optimization algorithm as a tool for determining the optimum degree of accelerating and overlapping in schedule activities. The "optimum degree" is the point that offers the maximum benefit from schedule compression.
For this purpose, data and information have been collected through extensive literature reviews, interviews, and focus groups. The findings are analyzed and formed the basis for developing an algorithm to optimize activity accelerating and overlapping in schedule activities. The algorithm developed, and the accompanying computer tool, have been tested and validated by several experiments showing their efficiency and effectiveness.
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Engineering--Industrial
Citation
Hazini Bahram Abadi, K. (2013). Optimum Degree of Activity Accelerating and Overlapping in Schedule Compression (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27218