"Completion of sub-projects in complex engineering projects"

Supervised by: Prof. Paul Davies, Loughborough University, Dr. Colm Connaughton, Warwick Mathematics Institute and Centre for Complexity Science, and Dr. Thomas House, Warwick Mathematics Institute and Centre for Complexity Science.

Abstract:

Delays and overruns are a major problem in project management. Due to unexpectedly large completion times that exceed the budget, many projects are canceled, thus leading to a great loss of money for companies. Current methods to evaluate the completion time of a project are not of statistical nature and try to predict only, at most, three-cases for the completion time: optimistic case, most likely and pessimistic case. In this work, we focus on a probabilistic model where a project evolves according to a continuous-time Markov process. We introduce the possibility of reversing back to earlier stages of a project with many components so that errors can be discovered and fixed and we evaluate the expected cost and the distribution of completion time in such cases. We also present the results of some simulations that test the robustness of the model and open up possibilities for more work.