The Critical Chain: The Theory Of Constraints Applied To Project Scheduling Management

Schedule planning is the core of project management, through the breakdown and making network planning, schedule planning system balance the resource and costs to optimize and generate the project plan. Reasonable project schedule planning is the bases of projects'perform, tracking and control. Modern projects become more complex, ask for shorter periods, less cost and must be finished on time, especially, for the modern enterprises that adopt supply chain management, one project's delay may affect interrelated project on the supply chain. So modern project schedule management should be more feasible, more doubtless and more stable, but the traditional project schedule management methods cannot fulfill these demands.The article analyzes the traditional project schedule management disadvantages systematically, and suggests applying Critical Chain to do project schedule management, in order to compensate shortcomings of traditional schedule management and improve efficiency and stability of project schedule planning. Critical Chain has been successful used in many enterprises and academies attach great importance to it since it's proposed in 1997, its contents differ with traditional project schedule management theories. Critical Chain project management focuses on the critical chain, when planning, it takes resource constrain and psychology factors into consideration, and makes use of buffering to control the project scheduling. Goldratt illuminated the main idea and overall steps of Critical Chain in his literature < Critical Chain >, but the literature did not refer to the concrete problems in the process of putting Critical Chain into practice. Through analyzing the Critical Chain's application in single-project schedule management and multi-project management, article devises a new scheduling method which adopts Heuristic Algorithms based on priority rules to generate schedule based on Critical Chain Project Management and proposes a new arithmetic method to obtain a reasonable feeding buffer capacity and project buffer capacity. In order to improve the ability of supervision and efficiency of buffer management, a new method based on buffer breaking and active decision-making mechanism is drawn. These methods mentioned above resolve the concrete problems exist in the application of Critical Chain.In order to analyze the improved effect of Critical Chain Project Management, the article uses software to simulate uncertainty of projects and sets project period as criterion. Through establishing the simulation model of Critical Chain schedule planning and traditional schedule planning, article compares the new period...