Research on Buffer Calculation Model of Critical Chain Based on Adjacency Information Entropy

In project network planning, the correlation complexity of the processes is not only related to the immediately preceding and following processes, but also closely related to indirect adjacent processes. In the existing relevant studies, many scholars have considered the influence of direct adjacent processes but ignored the influence of indirect adjacent processes. In addition, the three-point time estimation method and Monte Carlo simulation are mostly used in the current research for the estimation of process duration, while less research exists on the estimation of process optimal duration under multi-objective constraints. Therefore, this paper proposes a buffer calculation model of critical chain based on adjacency information entropy. This methodology provides comprehensive consideration of the relationship between cost, quality, safety, environment and process duration, the influence of process’s resource demand intensity, resource constraints and process duration on the buffer size, the influence of the relay potential of mutual cooperation and cross construction between processes, as well as the influence of adjacent complexity of processes on the project construction schedule. The calculation example analysis shows that this method can improve the accuracy of the calculation of process safety time, reduce the influence of the complexity of process adjacency correlation on the project construction schedule, reasonably control the buffer size, and effectively shorten the planned project duration.

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.