EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A linear Bayesian stochastic approximation to update project duration estimates

Sungbin Cho

European Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 196, issue 2, 585-593

Abstract: By relaxing the unrealistic assumption of probabilistic independence on activity durations in a project, this paper develops a hierarchical linear Bayesian estimation model. Statistical dependence is established between activity duration and the amount of resource, as well as between the amount of resource and the risk factor. Upon observation or assessment of the amount of resource required for an activity in near completion, the posterior expectation and variance of the risk factor can be directly obtained in the Bayesian scheme. Then, the expected amount of resources required for and the expected duration of upcoming activities can be predicted. We simulate an application project in which the proposed model tracks the varying critical path activities on a real time basis, and updates the expected project duration throughout the entire project. In the analysis, the proposed model improves the prediction accuracy by 38.36% compared to the basic PERT approach.

Keywords: Stochastic; approximation; Linear; Bayesian; method; Bayesian; belief; network; Project; duration; estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(08)00379-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:196:y:2009:i:2:p:585-593

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:196:y:2009:i:2:p:585-593