Scenario Analysis and PERT/CPM Applied to Strategic Investment at an Automated Container Port

Abstract

Particular scenarios of emergent and future conditions are more disruptive than others in terms of project schedules and the evolving priorities of project managers. It is essential to associate the scenarios with cost and schedule impacts to guide corrective or precautionary actions. The innovation of this paper is to use scenarios to investigate two modes of project disruption: (1) scenario-based preferences that change the relative emphasis placed on project management success criteria, and (2) scenarios that may change the structure of the project network and parameters of the constituent activities. These disruptions are used to reprioritize the activities of projects across scenarios subject to precedence constraints. The developed methodology is demonstrated with applications to strategic planning, capacity expansion, and operations of a shipping container port with billions of dollars of planned investment and millions of container transactions per year. The results characterize the scenarios that are most and least disruptive.