IMPROVING THE USABILITY OF STOCHASTIC SIMULATION BASED SCHEDULING SYSTEM

This paper introduces an automated tool named Advanced Stochastic Schedule Simulation System (AS4). The system automatically integrates CPM schedule data exported from Primavera Project Planner (P3) and historical activity duration data obtained from a project data warehouse, computes the best fit probability distribution functions (PDFs) of historical activity durations, assigns the PDFs identified to respective activities, computes the optimum number of simulation runs, simulates the schedule network for the optimum number of simulation runs, and estimates the best fit PDF of project completion times (PCTs). AS4 improves the reliability of simulation-based scheduling by effectively dealing with the uncertainties of the activities' durations, increases the usability of the schedule data obtained from commercial CPM software, and effectively handles the variability of the PCTs by finding the best fit PDF of PCTs. It is designed as an easy-to-use computer tool programmed in MATLAB. AS4 encourages the use of simulation-based scheduling because it is simple to use, it simplifies the tedious and burdensome process involved in finding the PDFs of the many activities' durations and in assigning the PDFs to the many activities of a new network under modeling, and it does away with the normality assumptions used by most simulation-based scheduling systems in modeling PCTs.