IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/annopr/v213y2014i1p27-6510.1007-s10479-013-1355-y.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A new approach for quantitative risk analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Stefan Creemers
  • Erik Demeulemeester
  • Stijn Vonder

Abstract

Project risk management aims to provide insight into the risk profile of a project as to facilitate decision makers to mitigate the impact of risks on project objectives such as budget and time. A popular approach to determine where to focus mitigation efforts, is the use of so-called ranking indices (e.g., the criticality index, the significance index etc.). Ranking indices allow the ranking of project activities (or risks) based on the impact they have on project objectives. A distinction needs to be made between activity-based ranking indices (those that rank activities) and risk-driven ranking indices (those that rank risks). Because different ranking indices result in different rankings of activities and risks, one might wonder which ranking index is best. In this article, we provide an answer to this question. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we set up a large computational experiment to assess the efficiency of ranking indices in the mitigation of risks, (2) we develop two new ranking indices that outperform existing ranking indices and (3) we show that a risk-driven approach is more effective than an activity-based approach. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Stefan Creemers & Erik Demeulemeester & Stijn Vonder, 2014. "A new approach for quantitative risk analysis," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 213(1), pages 27-65, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:213:y:2014:i:1:p:27-65:10.1007/s10479-013-1355-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s10479-013-1355-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10479-013-1355-y
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10479-013-1355-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Richard M. Van Slyke, 1963. "Letter to the Editor---Monte Carlo Methods and the PERT Problem," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 11(5), pages 839-860, October.
    2. Vanhoucke, Mario, 2010. "Using activity sensitivity and network topology information to monitor project time performance," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 38(5), pages 359-370, October.
    3. Elmaghraby, Salah E., 2005. "On the fallacy of averages in project risk management," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 165(2), pages 307-313, September.
    4. Elmaghraby, Salah E., 2000. "On criticality and sensitivity in activity networks," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 127(2), pages 220-238, December.
    5. Illana Bendavid & Boaz Golany, 2009. "Setting gates for activities in the stochastic project scheduling problem through the cross entropy methodology," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 172(1), pages 259-276, November.
    6. Yousry Abdelkader, 2010. "Adjustment of the moments of the project completion times when activity times are exponentially distributed," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 181(1), pages 503-514, December.
    7. Kolisch, Rainer & Sprecher, Arno, 1996. "PSPLIB - a project scheduling problem library," Manuskripte aus den Instituten für Betriebswirtschaftslehre der Universität Kiel 396, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Crispim, José & Fernandes, Jorge & Rego, Nazaré, 2020. "Customized risk assessment in military shipbuilding," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    2. Cui, Nanfang & Demeulemeester, Erik & Bie, Li, 2016. "Incorporation of activity sensitivity measures into buffer management to manage project schedule riskAuthor-Name: Hu, Xuejun," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 249(2), pages 717-727.
    3. F. Acebes & J. M. González-Varona & A. López-Paredes & J. Pajares, 2024. "Beyond probability-impact matrices in project risk management: A quantitative methodology for risk prioritisation," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-13, December.
    4. Tao, Liangyan & Wu, Desheng & Liu, Sifeng & Lambert, James H., 2017. "Schedule risk analysis for new-product development: The GERT method extended by a characteristic function," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 464-473.
    5. Xuejun Hu & Erik Demeulemeester & Nanfang Cui & Jianjiang Wang & Wendi Tian, 2017. "Improved critical chain buffer management framework considering resource costs and schedule stability," Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Springer, vol. 29(2), pages 159-183, June.
    6. Ali Namazian & Siamak Haji Yakhchali & Vahidreza Yousefi & Jolanta Tamošaitienė, 2019. "Combining Monte Carlo Simulation and Bayesian Networks Methods for Assessing Completion Time of Projects under Risk," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(24), pages 1-19, December.
    7. Hermans, Ben & Leus, Roel & Looy, Bart Van, 2023. "Deciding on scheduling, secrecy, and patenting during the new product development process: The relevance of project planning models," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    8. Junguang Zhang & Dan Wan, 2021. "Determination of early warning time window for bottleneck resource buffer," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 300(1), pages 289-305, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fernando Acebes & Javier Pajares & Jose M Gonzalez-Varona & Adolfo Lopez-Paredes, 2024. "Project Risk Management from the bottom-up: Activity Risk Index," Papers 2406.00078, arXiv.org.
    2. Cui, Nanfang & Demeulemeester, Erik & Bie, Li, 2016. "Incorporation of activity sensitivity measures into buffer management to manage project schedule riskAuthor-Name: Hu, Xuejun," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 249(2), pages 717-727.
    3. Song, Jie & Martens, Annelies & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2021. "Using Schedule Risk Analysis with resource constraints for project control," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 288(3), pages 736-752.
    4. Fernando Acebes & Javier Pajares & José M. González-Varona & Adolfo López-Paredes, 2021. "Project risk management from the bottom-up: Activity Risk Index," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 29(4), pages 1375-1396, December.
    5. Yousry Abdelkader, 2010. "Adjustment of the moments of the project completion times when activity times are exponentially distributed," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 181(1), pages 503-514, December.
    6. Wendi Tian & Erik Demeulemeester, 2014. "Railway scheduling reduces the expected project makespan over roadrunner scheduling in a multi-mode project scheduling environment," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 213(1), pages 271-291, February.
    7. Xiong, Jian & Leus, Roel & Yang, Zhenyu & Abbass, Hussein A., 2016. "Evolutionary multi-objective resource allocation and scheduling in the Chinese navigation satellite system project," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 251(2), pages 662-675.
    8. Azaron, Amir & Fatemi Ghomi, S.M.T., 2008. "Lower bound for the mean project completion time in dynamic PERT networks," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 186(1), pages 120-127, April.
    9. R A Bowman, 2007. "Efficient sensitivity analysis of PERT network performance measures to significant changes in activity time parameters," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 58(10), pages 1354-1360, October.
    10. Hazır, Öncü & Ulusoy, Gündüz, 2020. "A classification and review of approaches and methods for modeling uncertainty in projects," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 223(C).
    11. Martens, Annelies & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2019. "The impact of applying effort to reduce activity variability on the project time and cost performance," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 277(2), pages 442-453.
    12. Vaseghi, Forough & Martens, Annelies & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2024. "Analysis of the impact of corrective actions for stochastic project networks," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 316(2), pages 503-518.
    13. Trietsch, Dan & Mazmanyan, Lilit & Gevorgyan, Lilit & Baker, Kenneth R., 2012. "Modeling activity times by the Parkinson distribution with a lognormal core: Theory and validation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 216(2), pages 386-396.
    14. Gary Mitchell, 2010. "On Calculating Activity Slack in Stochastic Project Networks," American Journal of Economics and Business Administration, Science Publications, vol. 2(1), pages 78-85, March.
    15. Martens, Annelies & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2017. "A buffer control method for top-down project control," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 262(1), pages 274-286.
    16. Vanhoucke, Mario, 2011. "On the dynamic use of project performance and schedule risk information during projecttracking," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 416-426, August.
    17. Daniel Reich & Leo Lopes, 2011. "Preprocessing Stochastic Shortest-Path Problems with Application to PERT Activity Networks," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 23(3), pages 460-469, August.
    18. Colin, Jeroen & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2014. "Setting tolerance limits for statistical project control using earned value management," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 107-122.
    19. Zarghami, Seyed Ashkan & Dumrak, Jantanee, 2021. "Aleatory uncertainty quantification of project resources and its application to project scheduling," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 211(C).
    20. Richard E. Wendell & Timothy J. Lowe & Mike M. Gordon, 2023. "Dangers in using earned duration and other earned value metrics to measure a project’s schedule performance," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 31(2), pages 665-680, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:213:y:2014:i:1:p:27-65:10.1007/s10479-013-1355-y. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.