Abstract
Project management is a complex process impacted by numerous factors either from the external environment and/or internal factors completely or partially under the project manager's control. Managing projects successfully involves a complex amalgamation of comprehensive, informed planning, dynamic assessment and analysis of changes in external and internal factors, and the development and communication of updated strategies over the life of the project. Project management involves the interaction and analysis of many systems and requires the continuous integration and evaluation of large amounts of information. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) allow us to encode project management knowledge and experiential results to create a useful model of the interacting systems. This paper covers the representation and development of a construction project management FCM that provides an integrated view of the most important concepts affecting construction project management and risk management. This paper then presents the soft computing approach of FCM to project management (PM) modeling and analysis. The resulting PM-FCM models the interaction of internal and external factors and offers an abstract conceptual model of interacting concepts for construction project management application.
I. INTRODUCTION
Soft computing, and its foundational aspects such as fuzzy logic, continue to be applied to new application areas [1]. Soft computing and fuzzy logic methodologies offer a useful approach when modeling complex application domains requiring incorporation of subjective information and significant uncertainties, and when comprehensive, quantitative data sets are unavailable [2]. These conditions are often present when modeling construction engineering and management problems. Already, in this domain, fuzzy logic has been combined with other soft computing techniques to model, simulate, and create advanced dynamic systems [3].
V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this work, we presented a soft computing approach for forming an Project Management Fuzzy Cognitive Map (PMFCM) model. It has been presented how the PM-FCM is created so that to be a supporting tool when dealing with complex project management. Fuzzy aspects provide support for managing and incorporating the variety of complex internal and external uncertainties required when developing a dynamic, responsive project management plan. The resulting PM-FCM incorporated concepts related to project schedule, costs, and risks, and offers a way to assist project managers with estimating and managing complex projects in uncertain, dynamic environments.
Future work will further investigate the proposed model, running various scenarios to evaluate its performance and propose possible updates, it will also compare it with other similar approaches.
