Timely Project Completion Probability and Stability Cost on the Interaction among Uncertainty of Random Duration, Service Level and Feeding Buffer in a RCPSP Environment

The concept of feeding buffer, proposed by Goldratt (1997), has attracted much attention to the world. There are many researches on the feeding buffer size. However, actually in real practice, even the same project may need to insert with different size of feeding buffer as different team with different level of skilled workers and different project environment with different kind of uncertainty, resulting in different kind of safety time (Newbold, 2008). In this paper, we investigate the impact of feeding buffer size, service level (deadline), and uncertainty of activity duration on the timely project completion probability in a stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling (RCPSP) environment. The results indicate that there has a huge interaction between feeding buffer, deadline, and different level of uncertainty in the project activity duration. Extensive computational results will be presented on benchmark library PSBLIB instances and statistic analysis will be conducted by using SAS PROC GLM.