A Method for Activity Duration Estimation Based on Project Stability Available to Purchase

During the planning phase in real project management, it is one of essential problems for any project to determine the duration of each activity. This paper proposes a new method for determining the duration of activities of a given project based on a cost associated with the deviation of the starting time of each activity. The proposed method calculates the expected cost associated with a starting time deviation for each activity and then determines the duration of each activity so as to minimize the total expected cost. The proposed method is compared with some conventional methods. The numerical results derive some properties of the estimation methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.