Cost and experience based method for project acceleration

This paper provides an overview of the methods used in accelerating the delivery of engineering, procurement and construction projects at the strategic and tactical levels. It focuses primarily on the tactical level and introduces a new method designed to assist project teams, particularly those of contractors, in performing least cost acceleration of projects. The method can also be used for project scheduling in compliance with agreed upon contractual completion dates. Unlike the methods described in the literature, the proposedmethod accounts not only for cost, but also for contractors' past experience and judgment. It allows for generating a number of likely scenarios; facilitating well-informed decisions on compression of project activities. The proposed method was implemented as application in MS-Excel, dynamically linked to MSMicrosoft Project. It can easily be used as add-on utility to other scheduling software systems such as primavera. To illustrate the use of the proposed method and its capabilities, an example project drawn from the literature was analyzed and the results were then compared to those obtained by other methods.