Title: Hybrid artificial neural network and statistical model for forecasting project total duration in earned value management

Authors: You Li; Lu Liu

Addresses: School of Economics and Management, BeiHang University, Beijing 100191, China. ' School of Economics and Management, BeiHang University, Beijing 100191, China

Abstract: The paper proposes a new hybrid approach for forecasting project total durations in earned value management, which combines artificial neural network and random number simulation method to forecast the earned schedule indicator of each period one step further based on several nearest finished periods' status and then employs statistical method to estimate the project total duration and its intervals in each period of the project. Experiment results and test show our hybrid model outperforms the classic method of earned value management in both aspects of interval estimation and point estimation.

Keywords: project management; earned value management; EVM; artificial neural networks; ANNs; earned schedule; forecasting; statistical modelling; total project duration; random number simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2012.046460

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2012 Vol.10 No.3/4, pp.402 - 413

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

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