Research On Methods For Selection Of Project Risk Response Action

Project risk is defined as an uncertain event causing damage or loss,which is considered to be threatening in project management due to the fact that it exerts(causes)effects on project objectives such as schedule,cost and quality.In many cases,inadequate risk management would lead to project failure.For this reason,stakeholders usually ask the project manager to conduct more project risk management so as to control deviations from the project plan caused by project risks.Therefore,project risk management is an important topic for practitioners and academic scholars.In general,classical project risk management process includes three major stages:risk identification,risk analysis and risk response.Risk response refers to developing,selecting and implementing strategies in order to reduce risk exposure.In these stages,the risk response plays an important role in mitigating the negative impact of project risks.Appropriate risk response strategies must be selected to reduce global risk exposure in project implementation once the risks have been identified and analyzed.Therefore,the risk response strategy selection can be considered to be an important issue in project risk management.The purpose of this thesis is to make a theoretical analysis on the method for selection of project risk response action.A series of researches are conducted as follows.First,in risk response analysis,most of project risks are dependent,however,the risks affect each other in a certain of risk dependency.A method based on the MACBETH(Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation Technique)is proposed to measure the risk dependencies between the risks.Besides,an exponential utility function is used to describe the risk-averse behavior of project managers.Thus,a mathematical model that incorporates the project risk dependency and risk preference of the project manager is constructed.The computation results of the model based on the analysis of a case highlight two managerial implications.First,more expected utility can be obtained when the risk dependency is considered.Second,more attention should be paid to the project risk dependency for coping with critical project risks when the budget is tight.Second,a method based on case-based analysis and fuzzy programming is proposed in order to help project managers find out alternative historical risk response actions and further determine an optimal set of the project risk response actions.First,the target case and the historical cases are represented in a certain form,and then the fuzzy similarities between the historical risks and the target risks can be calculated by the proposed method.The historical risks with the fuzzy similarities higher than the predefined threshold can be screened out based on the calculated similarities,and then retrieved historical risk response actions should be revised according to the current project.Finally,the optimal set of project risk response actions can be obtained by using an optimization model.The computation results of the method based on the analysis of a case project highlight two managerial implications.First,to perform better risk response in future,organizations should always capture a long-term perspective,with an awareness of keeping documents of all handled historical projects.Second,since each risk response action obtained from the alternative historical cases needs to be adapted in accordance with the current situations,adaptation costs should also be taken into account when allocating budget for implementing the selected risk response actions set.Third,an improper or lagging risk response action may cause the time delay,budget overrun or the quality deterioration.Therefore,quickly formulating and determining the appropriate risk response action to mitigate the risk is critical to project risk management.In the sixth chapter,An MATLAB GUI-based decision support system is designed and implemented for determining the optimal set of risk response actions.In this decision support system,the historical risks and current risks can be stored in the database,and the alternative risk response action can be retrieved and screened out from the database.Use of the optimization module,project managers can build model which maximizes the implementation effect of risk response action within the budget,and obtain the optimal set of risk response actions.