A NEW PROJECT PLANNING MODEL FOR BETTER HANDLING VAGUENESS AND UNCERTAINTY OF REAL WORLD TASKS WITH AHP AND FUZZY NUMBERS

摘要

One of the most important problems of project management is the decision of task durations in the projects. The duration of each task and cumulative durations of the successive tasks generally results in the success or fail of that project. While the common practice is to use natural numbers for task duration, they generally fail to match the real world results. In order to obtain more realistic results, researchers used fuzzy numbers which resulted in an important improvement of estimations but with the vagueness and uncertainty of the business world, they still require improvement. In our study, we used fuzzy numbers with AHP to determine task durations and adapt them to real world, first we separately find the levels of vagueness and uncertainty of tasks using AHP and then we use these categories to manipulate our fuzzy membership function for better prediction of tasks' durations and certainty levels so we can provide a more accurate project plan with more realistic task durations.