A New Method to Tackle the Duration Risks of a Construction Project

Abstract

The most well-known traditional approach to deal with the uncertainties of the activity durations in a project was the Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). PERT is however impractical and seldom adopted in the construction projects due to the unreliable estimation based on the three-point durations. This paper proposes a new approach to tackle the risks with the activity durations by evaluating the seven constraints associated with different required construction resources. A quantitative model considering the seven risk-levels of activity duration is proposed. A risk-based critical path scheduling method (R-CPSM) is developed. A tennis court construction project is selected as an example for implementation of the proposed R-CPSM to demonstrate its applicability. It is found that the proposed R-CPSM replaces the lump-sum uncertain duration estimation of the traditional PERT with a systematic method that considers the 7-risk-level resource constraints, which tackles duration risks more appropriately. Moreover, it also provides a real-time risk updating mechanism that is lacked in the traditional PERT. As a result, it is concluded that the proposed R-CPSM has a potential to improve the management of duration risks in a construction project.