Abstract
It is important in project time management to estimate adequately the workload (e.g. personhours) of each activity taking into account project uncertainties such as over-/underestimations of the activity durations, workers, sudden sickness absence and so forth. In this paper, we propose a new method of the workload estimation aiming at enhancing a so-called schedule stability. It is expected that the schedule stability can be enhanced by considering the minimization of the delay cost associated with the deviations between planned and actual activity starting times. The proposed method successively changes the amount of resources allocated to the activities as well as the activity durations in order to minimize the expected delay cost. In the computational experiments,the proposed method is compared with two conventional estimation methods by using benchmark problem instances of project scheduling. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is effective from stability point of view.
