Development of a risk management approach for allowing dependency and uncertainty between activities' duration

Variations in the durations of activities are a common place in the construction industry. This is due to the fact that the construction industry is highly influenced by variations in weather, productivity of labour and plant, and quality of materials. Stochastic network analysis techniques has been used by previous researchers to model variations in activities and produce more effective and reliable project duration estimates. Although these techniques have proven to be useful in modeling variations in activities, dependencies of activities’ duration are not considered. This can have a severe impact on realistically modeling projects. In this context, the objective of this research is to develop a risk management methodology that can accurately model activities’ dependency and realistically predict project duration using a risk management approach. A simulation model has been developed to encapsulated the methodology and run experimental work.