Prioritizing construction activities: Addressing the flaws of schedule-based indexes

Research on prioritizing construction activities that are critical to the timely completion of projects rests on a range of indexes that attempt to identify the critical path and capture uncertainty in the duration of project activities. However, these indexes have been shown to have major flaws. These flaws can be broadly classified into two categories: (1) an incomplete representation of an activity’s importance and (2) problems in the mathematical representation of an activity’s importance. This article develops a new index that addresses the shortcomings of the available schedule-based indexes. The proposed index is applied to a real-life construction project to evaluate the significance of its activities. The results confirm the substantive influence of the structural organization of the project network on the relative importance of project activities. The key contribution of this research is to offer a richer approach to measuring the importance of construction activities by paying simultaneous attention to uncertainty in completion time, the total float, and the topological characteristics of project activities.