Extension of the Mitigation Controller for construction costing on the run

Abstract

Construction projects are notorious for going over budget. It is important for a project manager to have as much grip on the financial situation of the project as possible. In order to deal with the uncertainty that is prevalent in a construction project, a project manager should be able to steer project cost back towards budget.
To provide project managers with clear insight on the mitigation strategy that would be advised to be used. An adaptation of the mitigation controller (Kammouh et al, 2021) was developed in order to provide insight into mitigating project cost, as opposed to the original focus on project planning.
By adding goal focussed optimisation to a Monte Carlo Simulation, the human element of the corrective behaviour that is shown by a project manager is taken into account. This removes the fundamental modelling error that is present within traditional probabilistic approaches.
Through a real-life case from an infrastructural project in the centre of the Netherlands, its usefulness was shown. The Cost Mitigation Controller identified the most effective mitigation strategy for the projects current situation. The results from this study were evaluated using an experiment that was done with practitioners that work in project management roles. As a result it was shown that the Cost Mitigation Controller outperformed all project managers that were involved in the experiment. The probability of staying within budget for the Cost Mitigation Controller (74.6%) was around 4% higher than those of the three top performing project managers (70.3%).