STOCHASTIC SCHEDULING CONSIDERING INTERDEPENDENT ACTIVITY DURATIONS

A simulation model is proposed to evaluate the effect of correlations between activity durations on the overall project duration. The proposed model incorporates NORTA, a recent developed statistical method, into the simulation process to allow arbitrarily specified marginal distributions for activity durations and any desired correlation structure. The generality is of practical value when systematic data is not available and planners have to rely on arbitrary experts' estimation, which may involve a mixed situation when some activity durations are continuously distributed whereas others are discrete outcomes. The proposed model is validated by showing that the correlation coefficients of the simulation results are close to the originally specified ones. The simulation results are compared to two conventional approaches: PERT and simulation without correlation. The comparisons illustrate that the proposed model can provide important management information, which would otherwise be distorted due to the neglect of the correlations between activity durations.