Critical Path Definition Using Multicriteria Decision Making: PROMETHEE Method

Project managers are usually faced with decision environments in which there are a number of incommensurable and often conflicting objectives such as minimizing the total project costs, meeting a certain contracted date, conflicting expenses on a fixed budget, and ensuring that certain activities achieve certain quality levels. Furthermore, in some real-world situations, it may be difficult to get precise information about activity durations or cost. In these complex and uncertain environments in which numerous factors need to be considered, the ability to make sound decisions is very important to the success of a project. Multicriteria decision-making methods are a class of operations research models that deal with the process of making decisions in the presence of multiple objectives. This paper proposes the use of the preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation (PROMETHEE) method under fuzzy environments in order to determine the critical path of a network, considering not only time but also cost, quality, and safety criteria. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)ME.1943-5479.0000135. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.