The Interaction Between Critical Chain Sequencing, Buffer Sizing, and Reactive Actions in a CC/BM Framework

Abstract

In the past decades, the critical chain scheduling and buffer management (CC/BM) methodology has gained widespread acceptance as an emerging project planning and control technique. This paper first presents six priority indices for selecting the optimal critical chain when more than one such chain is possible. Next, we examine four schedule generation schemes for rescheduling, along with two control actions (i.e., expediting work to shorten activity durations and adding emergency resources to bring forward activity start times) for repairing a critical chain schedule whenever activity delays cross the buffer threshold. The main results of our computational experiments include the non-negligible impact of different critical chain sequences on the project robustness measures, the appropriate level of feeding buffer sizes, and the trade-off between different reactive responses in relation to the cost factors or management preferences.