Prioritizing Construction Activities: Addressing the Flaws of Schedule-Based Indexes
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 148, Issue 8
Abstract
Research on prioritizing construction activities that are critical to the timely completion of projects rests on a range of indexes that attempt to identify the critical path and capture uncertainty in the duration of project activities. However, these indexes have been shown to have major flaws. These flaws can be classified broadly into two categories: (1) incomplete representation of an activity’s importance; and (2) problems in the mathematical representation of an activity’s importance. This paper developed a new index that addresses the shortcomings of the available schedule-based indexes. The proposed index was applied to a real-life construction project to evaluate the significance of its activities. The results confirmed the substantive influence of the structural organization of the project network on the relative importance of project activities. The key contribution of this research is to offer a richer approach to measuring the importance of construction activities by paying simultaneous attention to uncertainty in completion time, the total float, and the topological characteristics of project activities.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published paper.
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 148 • Issue 8 • August 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 12, 2021
Accepted: Apr 6, 2022
Published online: May 27, 2022
Published in print: Aug 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Oct 27, 2022
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