Abstract
Accurate evaluation of project performance is one of the biggest concerns of project-oriented organizations, and project managers are always looking for suitable tools and techniques to monitor and control the project activities. For a long time, the earned value management system is helping project managers in achieving this objective. However, its predominant focus on project cost and other limitations paved the way for the development of the earned duration management (EDM) system. The EDM system examines the performance of a project in term of time and can also measure the effectiveness of the project schedule at different stages. Since, in real-life, projects are frequently surrounded by uncertainties, the EDM system was extended to fuzzy EDM to make project performance evaluation more realistic but at the expense of increased computational costs and assumptions. Grey system theory is a promising soft computing approach for situations involving uncertainties and can be employed with the least possible information and assumptions. Unlike the fuzzy set theory, it does not require a membership function, thus facilitating data processing. By benefiting from these advantages, the current study aims to propose grey earned duration management (EDM-G) system and compares it with fuzzy EDM and the original EDM systems. The results suggest, the EDM-G system is a convenient and reliable system while it does not require sophisticated computations, large datasets, and membership functions. Finally, its execution on a real-life industrial case study confirmed its validity and reliability, even when multiple experts are involved in performance measurement.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. NSFC-71771052. This paper includes the work that corresponds to the doctoral dissertation of the first author at the Southeast University, China.
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This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC-71771052).
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Mahmoudi, A., Javed, S.A. & Deng, X. Earned duration management under uncertainty. Soft Comput 25, 8921–8940 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-021-05782-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-021-05782-6