Planning and scheduling: A new model for planning and scheduling construction projects

After more than two decades of applying CPM as a planning and scheduling technique, recommended by a large number of researchers and backed by wide publicity, there is a growing doubt about CPM's ability to achieve some of the advantages attributed to its application at the beginning. There is a growing awareness of the CPM application problems. These problems are causing its application to be discarded in some small and large companies and limiting its use to the cases where required by clients. Some of the planners and schedulers, whom the researcher met through the survey interviews, had become totally unconvinced by any of the available planning and scheduling techniques. They discarded CPM or limited its application to a few projects when they had to and began to depend on their own experience. They used bar charts only as a method of presenting the developed schedules. The researcher has developed a new planning and scheduling model in which he tried to satisfy some requirements outlined in chapters two and four. The developed model offers different degrees of depth and scope, which satisfy all the different needs in the different project stages. The model uses the heuristic scheduling approach and classifies scheduling cases using two new criteria; the tightness degrees of completion due-dates and resource tightness degrees. The model and the associated heuristic scheduling rules proved throughout the scheduling experiments, to be practical, applicable, flexible and efficient. The researcher found no evidence for the need to introduce major modifications in the logical structure of the developed model to make it applicable and acceptable for construction companies in Egypt and other developing countries. With more training for responsible planners and schedulers and close follow up of the model implementation, especially in the early stages, the model could be efficient and applicable for these companies.