M-PERTpaper.pdf (6.04 MB)
M-PERT: Manual project-duration estimation technique for teaching scheduling basics
journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-27, 08:41 authored by Pablo Ballesteros-Perez© 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers. The program evaluation and review technique (PERT) has become a classic project management tool for estimating project duration when the activities have uncertain durations. However, despite its simplicity and widespread adoption, the original PERT, in neglecting the merge event bias, significantly underestimated the duration average and overestimated the duration variance of real-life projects. To avoid these and other shortcomings, many authors have worked over the last 60 years at producing interesting alternative PERT extensions. This paper proposes joining the most relevant of those to create a new reformulated PERT, named M-PERT. This reformulation is quite accurate when estimating real project duration, but allows for a number of interesting network modeling features that the original PERT lacked: probabilistic alternative paths, activity self-loops, minima of activity sets, and correlation between activities. However, unlike similar scheduling methods, M-PERT allows manual calculation through a recursive merging procedure that downsizes the network until the last standing activity represents the whole (or remaining) project duration. Hence, M-PERT constitutes an attractive tool for teaching scheduling basics to engineering students in a more intuitive way, with or without the assistance of computer-based simulations or software. One full case study is described and future research paths are suggested.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Journal of Construction Engineering and ManagementVolume
143Issue
9Citation
BALLESTEROS-PEREZ, P., 2017. M-PERT: Manual project-duration estimation technique for teaching scheduling basics. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 143(9): 04017063.Publisher
© ASCEVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Acceptance date
2017-03-20Publication date
2017Notes
This material may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the American Society of Civil Engineers. This material may be found at https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001358ISSN
0733-9364Publisher version
Language
- en