Cost Progress and Earned Value Analysis with Stochastic Activity Durations and Costs in Project Scheduling Problems

Abstract

This paper addressed two key issues: firstly, the cost incurred to complete an activity depends on its random duration; secondly, multiple methods to account for an activity cost are introduced. The upper and the lower bounds for cumulative cost curves over time can be tracked along a project progressed, which is obtained by mixing Monte Carl sampling with Gantt chart analysis. Moreover, these two bounds statistically represent the range for the budget cost of work scheduled; thus, the uncertain earned value analysis (EVA) is probed in our investigation. The conclusions indicate that project managers can obtain a degree of flexibility when adopting uncertain EVA to monitor status during project execution, which differs greatly from deterministic situations. Our study aims to illuminate some insights for the application of EVA under uncertain environments.