An Assessment Method for Project Cash Flow under Interval-Valued Fuzzy Environment

Effective project management requires reliable knowledge of cash required in different stages of project life cycle. Getting this knowledgeis highly dependent on sophisticated consideration of project environment. Nature of projects and their environments is associated withuncertain conditions. In this paper, a new project cash flow assessment method based on project scheduling is proposed to foresee projects cash flow in their different stages. Interval-valued fuzzy sets (IVFSs) are applied to address the uncertainty of activity durations and costs.First, an IVF-project scheduling method is proposed to calculate early start time and early finish time of activities under IVF-environment;accordingly, a new method of cash flow assessment is introduced under IVF-environment. For the purpose of illustration, the proposedmethod is implemented to generate cash flow of main activities of a large-scale project. The results show the flexibility of the presentedassessment method in expressing uncertainty, in addition to its capability in risk evaluation. Furthermore, using alpha-cuts to addressdifferent levels of uncertainty and risk provides a comprehensive insight into the cash required in different stages of project life cycle underdifferent levels of risk and uncertainty. Finally, the results are discussed, and the proposed method is believed to be useful in the projectevaluation.

Keywords:

Cost forecasting , Project cash flow , Fuzzy project scheduling , Assessment method , Interval-valued fuzzy sets (IVFSs)