Browsing by Author "Hussein Farooq Albayati, Noor"
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Item A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON RESOURCE LEVELING CAPABILITIES OF COMMERCIAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PACKAGES FOR PROJECTS WITH RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS(2022-01-14) Hussein Farooq Albayati, Noor; Aminbakhsh, SamanIn construction project management the critical path method (CPM) is the most commonly used technique for project scheduling. Although this technique provides many advantages for project managers, it cannot efficiently deal with the allocation of the resources. Therefore, other techniques have been introduced to address resource allocation requirements of the projects. Of these techniques, Resource Leveling aims to minimize the fluctuation in resource usage histograms obtained by CPM without violating the resource constraints, while securing the shortest CPM duration. Resource leveling is vital for effective utilization of project resources (e.g., manpower, machinery, and equipment) as it helps precluding intermittent usage of the resources. Keeping the resource usage at a relatively constant level would result in a decrease in the overall project cost as the additional costs required to demobilize and remobilize the resources will be minimized. The main objective of this study is to analyze effectiveness and efficiency of the most widely used commercial project management software packages in solving resource leveling problems with constrained resources. To this end, the most recent versions – as per the date of this study – of three software packages, namely, Microsoft Project Professional 2019, Primavera P6 Professional 2019, and Asta Powerproject version 15.0.01.489 are examined. The performance of the practiced software are evaluated based on thirteen different priority rules over a set of problem instances available in the literature. The practiced problems include 640 instances providing a diverse combination of network complexity, activity number, and resource type number. Results obtained by the software are also compared with the solutions provided by the Serial Scheduling Scheme – a heuristic method. The findings of the leveling process reveal while all the three software packages manage to provide comparable results, Asta PowerProject transpire to be the all-round best performing method while Primavera sports the fastest leveling module. This study also sheds light on the challenges and practical hurdles to utilization of the aforementioned software for resource leveling purposes.