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Full-Text Articles in Business
Subcontracting And Rework Cost Sharing In Engineering-Procurement-Construction Projects, Zhenzhen Chen, Wanshan Zhu, Pascale Crama
Subcontracting And Rework Cost Sharing In Engineering-Procurement-Construction Projects, Zhenzhen Chen, Wanshan Zhu, Pascale Crama
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Infrastructure development projects are overwhelmingly managed through engineering–procurement–construction (EPC) contracts, which allow a project end user to shift all project risks to a contractor. Accordingly, the International Federation of Consulting Engineers recommended a contract template based on a lump-sum contract between the end user and main contractor. However, EPC projects often suffer from quality issues due to moral hazard, which is aggravated by the involvement of subcontractors hired by the main contractor to perform parts of the project. Besides, costly rework is frequently needed to achieve the contractually mandated quality. When the main contractor must share some of the subcontractor’s …
Encouraging Help Across Projects, Pascale Crama, Fabian J. Sting, Yaozhong Wu
Encouraging Help Across Projects, Pascale Crama, Fabian J. Sting, Yaozhong Wu
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Companies struggle with timely project execution despite employing sophisticated management methods. Although help across projects is critical for time performance, it has not been explicitly incorporated into project management (PM) systems. We model a PM system, based on an innovative real-life practice, that both incorporates and shapes project managers’ helping behavior. A help process is at the core of this system, in which project managers may ask for and provide help while top management facilitates such exchanges. We find that companies should take a nuanced approach when designing help exchange and time-based incentives in tandem. A company that faces high …
New Product Development Flexibility In A Competitive Environment, Janne Kettunen, Yael Gruksha-Cockayne, Zeger Degraeve, Bert De Reyck
New Product Development Flexibility In A Competitive Environment, Janne Kettunen, Yael Gruksha-Cockayne, Zeger Degraeve, Bert De Reyck
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Managerial flexibility can have a significant impact on the value of new product development projects. We investigate how the market environment in which a firm operates influences the value and use of development flexibility. We characterize the market environment according to two dimensions, namely (i) its intensity, and (ii) its degree of innovation. We show that these two market characteristics can have a different effect on the value of flexibility. In particular, we show that more intense or innovative environments may increase or decrease the value of flexibility. For instance, we demonstrate that the option to defer a product launch …
Least Squares Approximation To Stochastic Optimization Problems, Zhichao Zheng, Karthik Natarajan, Chung-Piaw Teo
Least Squares Approximation To Stochastic Optimization Problems, Zhichao Zheng, Karthik Natarajan, Chung-Piaw Teo
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
This paper is motivated by the following question: How to construct good approximation for the distribution of the solution value to linear optimization problem when the objective function is random? More generally, we consider any mixed zero-one linear optimization problem, and develop an approach to approximate the distribution of its optimal value when the random objective coefficients follow a multivariate normal distribution. Linking our model to the classical Stein’s Identity, we show that the least squares normal approximation of the random optimal value can be computed by solving the persistency problem, first introduced by Bertsimas et al. (2006). We further …
R&D Project Scheduling When Activities May Fail, Bert De Reyck, Roel Leus
R&D Project Scheduling When Activities May Fail, Bert De Reyck, Roel Leus
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
An R&D project typically consists of several stages. Due to technological risks, the project may have to be terminated before completion, each stage having a specific likelihood of success. In the project planning and scheduling literature, this technological uncertainty has typically been ignored and project plans are developed only for scenarios in which the project succeeds. In this paper we examine how to schedule projects in order to maximize their expected net present value when the project activities have a probability of failure and when an activity's failure leads to overall project termination. We formulate the problem, show that it …
Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation To Chaos, Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph H. Loch, Michael T. Pich
Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation To Chaos, Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph H. Loch, Michael T. Pich
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
The article cites a study finding that accurately gauging the degree of uncertainty inherent in the projects can help project managers quickly adapt to it. Researchers studied 16 projects in areas including personal-computer development, telecommunications, Internet startups, pharmaceutical development, iron-ore processing, airship development, and building construction, to examine risk management and project outcomes. They found that most managers failed to recognize that there are different types of uncertainty, each requiring a different management approach. This paper explores uncertainty-based management, which derives planning, monitoring and management style from an uncertainty profile comprising four types of uncertainty: variation, foreseen uncertainty, unforeseen uncertainty, …
The Multi– Mode Resource– Constrained Project Scheduling Problem With Generalized Precedence Relations, Bert De Reyck, Willy Herroelen
The Multi– Mode Resource– Constrained Project Scheduling Problem With Generalized Precedence Relations, Bert De Reyck, Willy Herroelen
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
In this paper, we tackle the challenging problem of scheduling activities to minimize the project duration, in which the activities (a) are subject to generalized precedence relations, (b) require units of multiple renewable, non-renewable and doubly constrained resources for which a limited availability is imposed, and (c) can be performed in one of several different ways, reflected in multiple activity scenarios or modes. These multiple modes give rise to several kinds of tradeoffs (time/resource, time/cost and resource/resource trade-offs) which allow for a more effcient allocation and use of resources. We present a local search-based solution methodology which is able to …
Phase Transitions In Project Scheduling, Willy Herroelen, Bert De Reyck
Phase Transitions In Project Scheduling, Willy Herroelen, Bert De Reyck
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Researchers in the area of artificial intelligence have recently shown that many NP-complete problems exhibit phase transitions. Often, problem instances change from being easy to being hard to solve to again being easy to solve when certain of their characteristics are modified. Most often the transitions are sharp, but sometimes they are rather continuous in the order parameters that are characteristic of the system as a whole. To the best of our knowledge, no evidence has been provided so far that similar phase transitions occur in NP-hard scheduling problems. In this paper we report on the existence of phase transitions …
A Branch-And-Bound Procedure For The Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem With Generalized Precedence Relations, Bert De Reyck, Willy Herroelen
A Branch-And-Bound Procedure For The Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem With Generalized Precedence Relations, Bert De Reyck, Willy Herroelen
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We present an optimal solution procedure for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) with generalized precedence relations (RCPSP-GPR) with the objective of minimizing the project makespan. The RCPSPGPR extends the RCPSP to arbitrary minimal and maximal time lags between the starting and completion times of activities. The proposed procedure is suited for solving a general class of project scheduling problems and allows for arbitrary precedence constraints, activity ready times and deadlines, multiple renewable resource constraints with time-varying resource requirements and availabilities, several types of permissible and mandatory activity overlaps and multiple projects. It can be extended to other regular and …
Flexibility And Fms: An Empirical Analysis, Mihkel Tombak, Arnoud De Meyer
Flexibility And Fms: An Empirical Analysis, Mihkel Tombak, Arnoud De Meyer
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
It is shown how the concerns of the managers of firms with flexible manufacturing system projects (FMS) differ from those of manufacturing firms without FMS projects. An economic model is developed from which two hypotheses are obtained. The first hypothesis is that firms were investing in FMS to deal with the variance in their inputs. The second proposition is that firms wished to use FMS to deal with the variance in their outputs. Through an analysis of manufacturing survey data it was found that firms planning to implement FMS were statistically more concerned about vendor quality and vendor lead times …