As projects have become more and more complex, there has been an increasing concern about the concept of project complexity. An understanding of project complexity and how it might be managed is of significant importance for project managers because of the differences associated with decision‐making and goal attainment that are related to complexity. Complexity influences project planning and control; it can hinder the clear identification of goals and objectives, it can affect the selection of an appropriate project organization form, or it can even affect project outcomes. Identifying the different concepts associated to project complexity, its main factors and characteristics, the different types of project complexity, and the main project complexity models, can be of great support in assisting the global project management community. In this paper, we give a general overview of how complexity has been investigated by the project management community and propose several ideas to address this topic in the future.

Contractors play a vital role in the overall performance of a project. Selecting the right contractor for the right project is the most crucial challenge for any construction client. Numerous and often conflicting objectives and alternatives, such as tender price, completion date, and experience, need to be considered. Recently, to assist owners in making decisions, there has been a trend away from a “lowest-price wins” principle and subjective judgement to a multicriteria selection approach in the selection of contractors for construction projects. In the autonomous region of Cantabria, in the north of Spain, increased project complexity and higher requirements have recently demanded the use of multicriteria decision-making methods for contractor selection. With this aim, two multicriteria decision methods, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and vlsekriterijumska optimizacija I kompromisno resenje (VIKOR) methods, are applied to the selection of a contract...

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 ...

The Kyoto Protocol contains legally binding targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for industrialized countries. The importance of this agreement and the elaboration of a climate change policy make it necessary to define and establish national policy measures and to bring into force environmental regulations that will reduce GHG emissions. Extending our knowledge of the economic-ecologic relationships that exist within the production sphere can assist in defining and implementing successful environmental policies. In this paper, an Environmental/Input–Output linear programming model is proposed. To develop the model we consider the input–output model as a linear programming problem combining two types of restrictions: environmental restrictions establishing GHG emission targets, and economic restrictions. The model shows how targets for the emissions of GHGs may be reached and can affect production activity composition.