Construction Planning,

Scheduling and Control

Probabilistic Scheduling

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In life, uncertainty is a given. In
project plans, it can be a killer!

 How long will your commute take tonight?

Twenty minutes? Forty? Not sure? Project
teams face the same uncertainty every day,
only on a much larger scale!
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No Reply!
 It’s hard to know exactly how long it will
take to complete tasks
 Priorities shift as projects evolve
 The nature and scope of tasks often
change over time
 In the big picture, that means
◦ missed deadlines
◦ lost revenue
◦ team friction
◦ and much of the time, even project failure.
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What Comes to Your MIND?

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Uncertainty - defined
 It applies to predictions of future events,
to physical measurements already made,
or to the unknown.
 The lack of certainty; a state of having
limited knowledge where it is impossible
to exactly describe existing state or
future outcome, more than one possible
outcome.

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Project Uncertainty

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Motivations for Dealing with Project
Uncertainty
 Schedules exhibit high degree of uncertainty
◦ Weather occurrences
◦ Design duration
◦ Productivity
◦ Delivery times
◦ Subcontractor quality
◦ Regulatory changes etc…
 Clients and community may want to know milestones and finish
date with confidence
◦ Tenant move-in dates
◦ Traffic planning
◦ Event planning
 Reasoning about schedule constraints such as weather, seasonal
traffic
 Extensions may be much worse than early completion

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Approaches to Project Uncertainty
 Ignore
 Time buffers
 What-If Scenario Analysis
◦ Optimistic scenario
◦ Most likely scenario
◦ Pessimistic scenario
 Probabilistic Scheduling
◦ PERT
◦ Monte Carlo Simulation
◦ GERT

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Deterministic vs Probabilistic

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US Navy Polaris System

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PERT - Program Evaluation and
Review Technique
 It was developed for the U.S. Navy Special Projects
Office in 1957 to support the U.S. Navy's Polaris
nuclear submarine project
 Overall Master Schedule
 It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than
start- and completion-oriented
 It is used more in projects where time, rather than
cost, is the major factor
 It is applied to very large-scale, one-time, complex,
non-routine infrastructure and Research and
Development projects
 An example of this was for the “1968 Winter
Olympics in Grenoble” which applied PERT from
1965 until the opening of the 1968 Games
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PERT (Contd.)
 It is closely similar to a CPM process: the
difference is that it uses probabilistic
estimates for activity durations
 The result of the PERT network solution
is a critical path, which doesn’t have a
deterministic length, but rather an
expected duration associated with its
inherent probability, resulting from
statistical issues.

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 PERT requires frequency distribution for
each activity.

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PERT (Contd.)
 For each activity within the project, three
possible durations are estimated:
◦ optimistic scenario (a)
 the shortest possible duration
◦ most likely scenario (m)
 the most common duration
◦ pessimistic scenario (b)
 the longest possible duration
 Once determined, the three values can be
used to deduce a Beta distribution.

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PERT - Steps
 Optimistic a
 Most Likely m
 Pessimistic b
 Expected Duration
1 1  a  4m  b
d   2m  ( a  b)  
3 2  6
ba
 Standard deviation s
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 Variance v = s2
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PERT – Steps (contd.)
 Using the Variance (v), likelihood can be
calculated
 This likelihood presents a percentage of
certainty regarding the calculated
schedule
 Normal distribution chart is used for this
purpose

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Normal Distribution Table

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PERT – Example 1
 ABC Construction, the main contractor for the construction of a warehouse, has hired a
subcontractor, JKL Concrete, to pour the concrete foundation. Main contractor needs to
know the duration of this event so it can plan other activities accordingly.
 To estimate the duration, the corporation has asked an experienced executive to estimate
an optimistic, most likely and pessimistic duration for the pouring of the concrete slab.
The responses are shown below:
 optimistic duration a = 5 days
 most likely duration m = 6 days
 pessimistic duration b = 9 days
 Using equation, the expected duration is:
 d = ( a + 4m + b ) / 6 = ( 5 + 4 ⋅ 6 + 9) / 6 = 6.33 days
 The standard deviation is calculated:
 S = ( b - a ) / 6 = ( 9 – 5) / 6 = 0.67
 This implies the variance is equal to V = 0.44
 The Normal Distribution Table, where V = 0.44 has a corresponding likelihood value of
67%, helps us approximate that the duration of 6.33 days is likely to occur with 67%
probability.

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PERT Simplified
 The steps in PERT analysis are:
 obtain a, m and b for each activity of the
network
 compute expected activity duration and
activity variance
 compute expected project duration using
standard CPM algorithm
 compute project variance V=S2 as sum of
critical path activity variance
 calculate the probability of completing the
project using the normal distribution table

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PERT – Example 2
Activity Predecessor a m b d v

A - 1 2 4 2.17 0.25

B - 5 6 7 6.00 0.11

C - 2 4 5 3.83 0.25

D A 1 3 4 2.83 0.25

E C 4 5 7 5.17 0.25

F A 3 4 5 4.00 0.11

G B,D,E 1 2 3 2.00 0.11

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PERT – Example 2 (contd.)
 The AON network representation below uses the
expected durations of individual activities on to
compute the total expected duration of the project.
 The total length of the critical path Te equals 11,
through activities C-E-G:

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 PERT – Example 2 (contd.)
The resulting total variance of the critical path is:
S 2 = V[C] +V[E] +V[G] = 0.25 + 0.25 + 0.1111 = 0.611
and the total standard deviation is computed as:
S = (0.6111)1/2 = 0.7817
Now, the probability that the project will be finished in D days
or less can be computed as the probability associated with the
value z in the normal distribution chart:
Pn(z) = ( D – Te ) / S
where Te equals the critical duration and S is the calculated total
standard deviation.
In the sample above, the likelihood of ending the project before
time 10 is 10%; in fact, it can be calculated as follows:
 10  11 
P z    Pz  1.2793  1  Pz  1.2793  1  0.8997  0.1003  10%
 0.7818 
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