The Research Of Project Schedule Based On Grey Critical Chain Management

With the development of economy, the market competition of modern project is becoming increasingly intensive. Meanwhile, the uniqueness, complexity and uncertainty of the project also increase. Therefore, in order to maintain the competence of project team, the project should be completed within a shorter duration, at lower cost as well as higher quality. The shorter duration requires a well schedule control of the project managers. A good schedule control is one of the three key elements of project control, which is closely related with the project cost and quality. Therefore, it is highly important to develop a comprehensive schedule plan for project schedule controlling so that the project can be profitable. Critical chain project management is a schedule control method which considers the shortage of resources and process sequence as equally important. In addition, it also considers the iniluence of human factors, thus absorbing more uncertainties on the project.Because of its advantages in many aspects, critical chain management method has been widely focused by enterprises and academic researchers recently and used successfully in many practices. In this paper, an improved grey critical chain method is used to manage the schedule control of the project under the risk influence. It helps to deal with the difficulties caused by the uncertainty of the project during project implementation process. We further investigated the critical chain identification, buffer setup and management during the schedule control process.Firstly, the objective gray relational analysis method is combined with the relatively subjective analytic hierarchy process at the critical chain identification stage. Therefore, a more practical and suitable index weight and the ideal object of the grey critical chain can be determined. Secondly, the index " correlation of the procedures" under the risk influence is put forward, because of the defect during the current process of the critical chain identification and buffer setup that the various procedures are considered as independent. When the project encountered some risk, the buffer will be able to absorb more uncertainties, considering that the corresponding procedures will produce a chain reaction because of its relevance. Lastly, due to the fact that the currently widely used buffer monitoring method cannot timely reflect the gradually decreasing uncertainty, a dynamic buffer monitoring model is put forward. In the dynamic buffer monitoring process, managers will dynamically adjust the trigger point. The buffer size of each link will be updated according to the project progress, thus the dynamic buffer monitoring model can produce more accurate and practical early warning signal. The superiority of the critical chain schedule control method is further verified by practical examples and the simulation results.