Continuous earned value management with singularity functions for comprehensive project performance tracking and forecasting

Abstract

Earned value management (EVM) is a classical project monitoring technique that is widely used in construction projects. Due to its simplicity, this technique suffers from limitations due to its discrete nature – activity durations, costs, and progress are gathered only at update points with no information in between. These limitations preclude EVM from being easily implemented on some project types (e.g. repetitive projects) and in conjunction with some planning techniques (e.g. linear scheduling), where information continuity is both possible and desired. Therefore, in EVM is reformulated based on singularity functions (SF). SF are a type of expressions that can be easily concatenated to model continuous inputs at the activity-level. SF are also additive so as to immediately yield project-level performance information. It is demonstrated how the complete theory of EVM is newly expressed in SF. This offers several advantages: (1) EVM metric axes can be easily swapped (allowing exact calculation of modern metrics such as Earned Schedule or the p-factor); (2) activity progress data can be inserted at any frequency as the available data allow; and (3) short-term project duration and cost forecasts are directly possible for the first time. These advantages are exemplified on a real construction project. Finally, it is discussed how the new formulation with SF produces more accurate project duration and cost estimates compared to the former discrete EVM on real construction projects.