¹Department of Decision and Information Sciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Correspondence: RL Bregman, Department of Decision and Information Sciences, C. T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, 334 Melcher Hall, Houston, TX 77204-6021, USA. E-mail: RBregman@uh.edu

Received July 2006; Accepted August 2007; Published online 28 November 2007.

Abstract

Project expediting is often viewed as a corrective action taken in response to prior scheduling errors and is usually applied in the later stages of projects when it appears that predefined due dates will not be met. However, large-scale projects with uncertain activity durations tend to have numerous probabilistic network paths with complex interactions that require some level of expediting to ensure successful scheduling outcomes. Because potential expediting options are consumed over time, delaying expediting efforts until the later stages of projects is likely to result in higher expediting costs or poorer due date performance. This research introduces a preemptive expediting approach that evaluates the probability of completion before the due date throughout the life of a project and selects expediting options per a prespecified probability tolerance or expediting budget. An experiment demonstrates the benefits of this preemptive approach.