MODELING MEASURES OF RISK CORRELATION FOR QUANTITATIVE FLOAT MANAGEMENT OF CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Risk exists in all construction projects and resides among the collection of subcontractors and their array of individual activities. Wherever risk resides, the interrelation of participants to one another becomes paramount for the way in which risk is measured. Inherent risk becomes recognizable and quantifiable within network schedules in the form of consuming float - the flexibility to absorb delays. Allocating, owning, valuing, and expending such float in network schedules has been debated since the inception of the critical path method itself. This research investigates the foundational element of a three-part approach that examines how float can be traded as a commodity, a concept whose promise remains unfulfilled for lack of a holistic approach. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of financial portfolio theory, which describes the relationship between risk and expected return of individual stocks, is explored as an analogy to quantify the inherent risk of the participants in construction projects. The inherent relationship between them and their impact on overall schedule performance, defined as schedule risk -the likelihood of failing to meet schedule plans and the effect of such failure, is matched with the use of CAPM's beta component - the risk correlation measure of an individual stock to that of the entire market - to determine parallels with respect to the inner workings and risks represented by each entity or activity within a schedule. This correlation is the initial theoretical extension that is required to identify where risk resides within construction projects, allocate and commoditize it, and achieve actual tradability.