Papers by Fernando Acebes
Project Management and Engineering, 2015
In this paper we explore through a case study how project estimated duration and project variabil... more In this paper we explore through a case study how project estimated duration and project variability are affected by changes in activity duration and/or its variability. This analysis allows us to reveal the most influencing activities, and how they impact project duration and variability. At the same time, criticality index and cruciality index are analyzed for each activity when their duration and variance are modified.
Project Management and Engineering Research, 2015
Earned Value Management (EVM) tells the project manager whether the project has overruns (costs, ... more Earned Value Management (EVM) tells the project manager whether the project has overruns (costs, delays) or it is running better than planned. But taking into account uncertainty, the methodology does not specify whether the deviation from planned values is within the possible deviations derived from the expected variability of the project. In this paper, we propose a different approach for monitoring and control projects under uncertainty. We use Monte Carlo simulation to obtain the "universe" of possible project runs and we define new and innovative graphs. When the project is running, we represent with these graphs where the project is, so that we can know whether project cost or duration is under control at any time, for a given level of confidence.
Journal of Project Management , 2020
The main issue for portfolio managers is to find a feasible schedule that guarantees the availabi... more The main issue for portfolio managers is to find a feasible schedule that guarantees the availability of the resources required by the activities at the dates they are scheduled, which is the classical objective of the Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problem (RCMPSP). This paper goes one step further and presents an algorithm that solves the RCMPSP where each project has a different priority for the organization. With this information, the algorithm uses a market-based mechanism to determine what activities should receive preferential treatment during the scheduling process. Therefore, among the multiple possible schedules that comply with the resource constraints (i.e. the solution provided by classical approaches to RCMPSP), our approach allows obtaining a schedule for the portfolio in which, beyond minimizing the duration of the portfolio, the activities are scheduled considering the portfolio manager's priorities.
Lecture Notes in Management and Industrial Engineering, 2021
There are proven techniques and tools that project managers use to monitor and control the projec... more There are proven techniques and tools that project managers use to monitor and control the project. Some of them are as common as the Earned Value methodology (EVM). Due to the limitations of the previous methodology, procedures arise that incorporate uncertainty in the project control. However, the advance in research on advanced statistical techniques allows the development of more current tools that determine, on the one hand, the status of the project, and on the other, predict the future situation at the end of the project. In this article, we show how to use these advanced classification and regression techniques applied to project management, focused on the supervision and control of the time and the cost of the project. An example is included where we apply Monte Carlo simulation to obtain a set of data that will be treated with statistical tools and algorithms, which will allow us to determine, for any project control point, the probability of compliance with the planned objectives of time and cost and, where appropriate, predict what will be the deviation from such planning.
Sustainability, 2020
Additive manufacturing of spare parts significantly impacts industrial, social, and environmental... more Additive manufacturing of spare parts significantly impacts industrial, social, and environmental aspects. However, a literature review shows that: (i) academic papers on the adoption of additive manufacturing have focused mainly on large companies; (ii) the methods required by SMEs to adopt new technologies differ from those employed by large companies; and (iii) recent studies suggest that a suitable way to help small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt new additive manufacturing technologies from the academic world is by presenting case studies in which SMEs are involved. Given the increasing number of global SMEs (i.e., SMEs that manufacture locally and sell globally), we claim that these companies need to be assisted in adopting spare-parts additive manufacturing for the sake of resource and environmental sustainability. To bridge this gap, the purpose of this article is to present a case study approach that shows how a digital supply chain for spare parts has the potential to bring about changes in business models with significant benefits for both global SMEs (more effective logistic management), customers (response time), and the environment (reduced energy, emissions, raw materials, and waste).
International Journal of Production Management and Engineering, 2020
Production planning in 3D printing factories brings new challenges among which the scheduling of ... more Production planning in 3D printing factories brings new challenges among which the scheduling of parts to be produced stands out. A main issue is to increase the efficiency of the plant and 3D printers productivity. Planning, scheduling, and nesting in 3D printing are recurrent problems in the search for new techniques to promote the development of this technology. In this work, we address the problem for the suppliers that have to schedule their daily production. This problem is part of the LONJA3D model, a managed 3D printing market where the parts ordered by the customers are reorganized into new batches so that suppliers can optimize their production capacity. In this paper, we propose a method derived from the design of combinatorial auctions to solve the nesting problem in 3D printing. First, we propose the use of a heuristic to create potential manufacturing batches. Then, we compute the expected return for each batch. The selected batch should generate the highest income. Several experiments have been tested to validate the process. This method is a first approach to the planning problem in 3D printing and further research is proposed to improve the procedure.
Direccion y Organizacion, 2020
Las grandes empresas están totalmente involucradas en su transformación digital, y en concreto en... more Las grandes empresas están totalmente involucradas en su transformación digital, y en concreto en el desarrollo de proyectos estratégicos de Business Intelligence (BI). Cuentan con una Estrategia Digital y directivos al más alto nivel gestionando el cambio. En las PYMES también se realizan proyectos de BI. En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de un estudio interpretativo realizado sobre una muestra de PYMES de diferentes sectores, que están realizando proyectos de BI. Estudiamos si los modelos de madurez en BI son válidos para las PYMES y su utilidad para analizar los proyectos y evaluar a su finalización los resultados.
Sustainability, 2020
The current increase in e-commerce is generating growing problems in urban areas in terms of both... more The current increase in e-commerce is generating growing problems in urban areas in terms of both traffic flow (increasing traffic, no parking spaces) and environmental issues (noise, atmospheric pollution, etc.). In parallel, an iconic element of historic districts is disappearing: more and more newspaper kiosks are closing their business as their work dwindles. In this scenario, the objective of this paper is to propose a model for last-mile parcel delivery that exploits the current available newspaper kiosk network by using them as parcel lockers. To demonstrate the benefits of this proposal, we map the kiosk network of the city of Valladolid (Spain), and compare the environmental impact of a traditional (door-to-door) delivery and the proposed model which reuses old kiosks as parcel lockers. The necessary steps to carry out simulations are described in detail so that experiments can be replicated in other cities that face the same issues.
Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 2021
Purpose: The new competitive environment characterized by innovation and constant change is forci... more Purpose: The new competitive environment characterized by innovation and constant change is forcing a new organizational behavior. This requires a digital transformation of SMEs based on collective performance determinants. SMEs have particular characteristics that differentiate them from large companies and a model that allows them to identify, leverage and develop their digital capabilities can help them to advance in digital maturity. Design/methodology/approach: An in-depth review of the existing literature on digital transformation and organizational competence was carried out on Scopus and Web of Science to identify the digital challenges faced by SMEs, and what digital capabilities they have to develop to face these challenges. In order to obtain the necessary information for the refinement of organizational competence for digital transformation model, six experts were interviewed; three of them are academics and the other three are professionals with management responsibilities in SMEs. We used semi-structured interviews, to keep the interviews focused and facilitate cross-data analysis between experts. In addition, it allowed us the possibility of analyzing new relevant aspects that could arise during the interview.
Computers & Industrial Engineering, 2021
Obtaining a viable schedule baseline that meets all project constraints is one of the main issues... more Obtaining a viable schedule baseline that meets all project constraints is one of the main issues for project managers. The literature on this topic focuses mainly on methods to obtain schedules that meet resource restrictions and, more recently, financial limitations. The methods provide different viable schedules for the same project, and the solutions with the shortest duration are considered the best-known schedule for that project. However, no tools currently select which schedule best performs in project risk terms. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to propose a method for selecting the project schedule with the highest probability of meeting the deadline of several alternative schedules with the same duration. To do so, we propose integrating aleatory uncertainty into project scheduling by quantifying the risk of several execution alternatives for the same project. The proposed method, tested with a wellknown repository for schedule benchmarking, can be applied to any project type to help managers to select the project schedules from several alternatives with the same duration, but the lowest risk.
Central European Journal of Operations Research, 2021
Project managers need to manage risks throughout the project lifecycle and, thus, need to know ho... more Project managers need to manage risks throughout the project lifecycle and, thus, need to know how changes in activity durations influence project duration and risk. We propose a new indicator (the Activity Risk Index, ARI) that measures the contribution of each activity to the total project risk while it is underway. In particular, the indicator informs us about what activities contribute the most to the project's uncertainty so that project managers can pay closer attention to the performance of these activities. The main difference between our indicator and other activity sensitivity metrics in the literature (e.g. cruciality, criticality, significance, or schedule sensitivity indices) is that our indicator is based on the Schedule Risk Baseline concept instead of on cost or schedule baselines. The new metric not only provides information at the beginning of the project, but also while it is underway. Furthermore, the ARI is the only one to offer a normalized result: if we add its value for each activity, the total sum is 100%.
Ensuring Sustainability, 2022
Risk Management has become a topic of interest in the Management literature in general, and parti... more Risk Management has become a topic of interest in the Management literature in general, and particularly in the Project Management discipline. Notwithstanding, there is not widespread agreement on the concept of risk. An extensive literature review allows us to identify four types of uncertainty: stochastic, aleatoric, epistemic and ontological. The use of appropriate techniques and tools is basic for quality risk management. This paper aims to present a summary of the tools and techniques recommended to deal with each type of uncertainty.
IoT and Data Science in Engineering Management, 2023
Risk Management is a core discipline within Project Management. The successful achievement of pro... more Risk Management is a core discipline within Project Management. The successful achievement of project objectives depends enormously on the proper implementation of project risk management, which includes the identification, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, planning and implementation of risk response and control. In this article, we focus on quantitative risk analysis. To assist project management students in dealing with project risks, we have developed an application in Matlab® (MCSimulRisk) that allows students to perform Monte Carlo Simulation applied to any project type simply and intuitively. Consequently, a valuable amount of time that would otherwise be wasted in project configuration can be devoted to interpreting the results. In addition, the presented tool allows modeling any type of project uncertainty and is not restricted to the aleatory uncertainty associated with the duration of the activities, which is the only type of uncertainty considered by other analysis tools available to date.
Industry 4.0: The Power of Data, 2023
The construction industry is one of the world's most important industries, but today it is one of... more The construction industry is one of the world's most important industries, but today it is one of the most inefficient and late adopters of technological advances. Moreover, the development of BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology has proliferated, which has generated a revolution in working and carrying out projects, given the many benefits it offers. This work aims to propose an integrative methodology to complement the current project management in construction based on both processes of the PMBoK (Project Management Institute) Guide and BIM methodology. This implementation aims to unify the processes of both methodologies, eliminating redundancies and simplifying the work of project managers and other professionals in the construction industry (architecture, engineering, and construction [AEC]) to manage their projects simpler and efficiently.
International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management (ICIEIM), 2023
Qualitative project risk assessment is standard practice in project management and involves prior... more Qualitative project risk assessment is standard practice in project management and involves prioritising risks using a probability and impact matrix. Due to the shortcomings of using this tool for risk prioritisation (poor resolution, errors, suboptimal resource allocation or ambiguous inputs and outputs, among others), we propose a quantitative prioritisation of project risks in this article, analysing the impact of each risk on the project's duration and cost objectives.
International Journal of Simulation Modelling , 2024
This paper presents a simulation approach to enhance the performance of heuristics for multiproje... more This paper presents a simulation approach to enhance the performance of heuristics for multiproject scheduling. Unlike other heuristics available in the literature that use only one priority criterion for resource allocation, this paper proposes a structured way to sequentially apply more than one priority criterion for this purpose. By means of simulation, different feasible schedules are obtained to; therefore, increase the probability of finding the schedule with the shortest duration. The performance of this simulation approach was validated with the MPSPLib library, one of the most prominent libraries for resource-constrained multiproject scheduling. These results highlight the proposed method as a useful option for addressing limited time and resources in portfolio management.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications , 2024
The project managers who deal with risk management are often faced with the difficult task of det... more The project managers who deal with risk management are often faced with the difficult task of determining the relative importance of the various sources of risk that affect the project. This prioritisation is crucial to direct management efforts to ensure higher project profitability. Risk matrices are widely recognised tools by academics and practitioners in various sectors to assess and rank risks according to their likelihood of occurrence and impact on project objectives. However, the existing literature highlights several limitations to use the risk matrix. In response to the weaknesses of its use, this paper proposes a novel approach for prioritising project risks. Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) is used to perform a quantitative prioritisation of risks with the simulation software MCSimulRisk. Together with the definition of project activities, the simulation includes the identified risks by modelling their probability and impact on cost and duration. With this novel methodology, a quantitative assessment of the impact of each risk is provided, as measured by the effect that it would have on project duration and its total cost. This allows the differentiation of critical risks according to their impact on project duration, which may differ if cost is taken as a priority objective. This proposal is interesting for project managers because they will, on the one hand, know the absolute impact of each risk on their project duration and cost objectives and, on the other hand, be able to discriminate the impacts of each risk independently on the duration objective and the cost objective.
Dirección y Organización, 2024
La gestión del riesgo es una disciplina fundamental dentro de la gestión de proyectos, la cual in... more La gestión del riesgo es una disciplina fundamental dentro de la gestión de proyectos, la cual incluye, entre otros, el análisis cuantitativo de los riesgos. A lo largo de varios años de docencia, hemos observado dificultades en los alumnos al realizar Simulación de Monte Carlo, dentro del análisis cuantitativo de los riesgos. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar "MCSimulRisk", como herramienta docente que permitirá a los estudiantes realizar simulación de Monte Carlo y aplicarlo a proyectos de cualquier complejidad, de una manera sencilla e intuitiva. Esta herramienta posibilita incorporar al modelo cualquier tipo de incertidumbre identificada en el proyecto.
Dyna, 2024
The main objective of this work is to propose a method based on Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) to e... more The main objective of this work is to propose a method based on Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) to estimate the allocation of project cost contingency reserves in the planning phase, incorporating the different types of uncertainty described in the literature, associating them to each of the risks identified in the project. The method was applied to validate our proposal on an actual construction project carried out by the University of Valladolid (Spain). Applying the proposed method has allowed us to obtain a more accurate estimate of cost contingencies than the method traditionally used by the company, which consisted of reserving a fixed and arbitrary percentage of the total project execution budget.
In this paper, we apply a case study approach to advance current understanding of what effects pu... more In this paper, we apply a case study approach to advance current understanding of what effects public co-funding of R&D projects have on project team members' perceived complexity. We chose an R&D project carried out by an industrial SME in northern Spain. The chosen research strategy was a qualitative approach, and sixteen employees participated in the project. We held in-depth semi-structured interviews at the beginning and end of the co-funded part of the project. NVivo data analysis software was used for qualitative data analysis. Results showed a substantial increase in perceived complexity. We observed that this was due to unresolved tension between the requirements of the project's co-financing entity and normal SME working procedures. New working procedures needed to be developed in order to comply with the co-financing entity's requirements. However, overall perceived complexity significantly decreased once the co-financed part of the project was completed.
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Papers by Fernando Acebes