Generating project risk response strategies based on CBR: A case study

Risk response is an important work in project risk management (PRM). To generate project risk response strategies, retrieving and reusing information and knowledge of the similar historical cases is important, while research concerning this issue is still relatively scarce. Taking the risk response of the subway project in S city, China as a case problem, this paper proposes a pragmatic method for generating project risk response strategies based on the case-based reasoning (CBR). The procedure of the method include the five parts: first, representing the target case and the historical cases; second, retrieving the available historical cases by judging whether the risks involved in each historical case cover or are the same as those in the target case; third, retrieving the similar historical cases by measuring the similarity between each available historical case and the target case; fourth, revising the inapplicable risk response strategies involved in the similar historical cases by analyzing the response relation between each strategy and each risk of the current project; and generating the desirable risk response strategies by evaluating each candidate risk response strategy set. To illustrate the use of the proposed method, an empirical analysis of generating the risk response strategies for the subway station project is given. The proposed method can support project managers to make the better decision in PRM. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.