An efficient and effective method for reliability assessment of project duration

ABSTRACT

The reliability assessment of the project duration is essential for successful project management; this has prompted the development of various methods to assess whether a project will be completed within the target duration. In this study, an efficient and effective method for assessing the reliability of project duration based on the method of moments is proposed, which utilizes bivariate-dimension reduction technology and the third-moment reliability index. The proposed method can avoid the extensive calculations of various factors in the commonly used methods: the correlation coefficients between each pair of paths and the joint failure probability of each pair of representative paths. From two numerical examples, it can be concluded that the proposed method can obtain almost the same results as Monte Carlo simulations with less calculation.

KEYWORDS:

• Project duration
• reliability assessment
• method of moments
• bivariate-dimension reduction
• third-moment reliability index
• Monte Carlo simulations

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51738001]; and the China Scholarship Council [grant number 201806370214]. All sources of support are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the China Scholarship Council [grant number 201806370214]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51738001]

Notes on contributors

Lu Ren

Lu Ren is currently a lecture in the Department of Architecture and Building Engineering at Hebei Petroleum University of Technology of China. Her main research interests are in the area of Reliability analysis, Risk and safety analysis, and Project Management.

Pei-Pei Li

Pei-Pei Li is currently a PhD. student in the Department of Architecture and Building Engineering at Kanagawa University of Japan. Her main research interests are in the area of Reliability analysis, Risk and uncertainty analysis, and Information updating.

Yan-Gang Zhao

Yan-Gang Zhao is currently a professor at the Department of Architecture and Building Engineering at Kanagawa University of Japan. His main research interests are in the area of Reliability analysis, Structural engineering, Structural safety, Image analysis, and Structural Analysis.